Surveillance is critical for the protection of businesses and families. And the capacity to zoom in and focus on suspecting trouble are two of the most sought-after capabilities when deciding which cameras to purchase.

When looking for new cameras for your security system, you may have come across some with zoom capability that supports optical zoom, digital zoom, or a mix of the two. In this guide, we’ll show you how to zoom in using each variant.

Optical zoom cameras allow you to zoom in to see more details of a surveillance area or object, or zoom out to have a better, wider viewing angle, without sacrificing image quality. Cameras with optical zoom keep their focus even when the focal length shifts.

These security cameras have several zoom levels: 3X, 5X, 10X, or 20X, depending on the magnification. If you want to acquire high-quality surveillance photos or videos, you should get the highest optical security camera zoom.

You can find three types of optical zoom security cameras:

Before you start recording surveillance footage, you can manually set the zoom level, viewing angle, and focus with Varifocal optical zoom cameras. For that, you can use the screws that you can typically find on the bottom of your camera. You will see that depending on which direction you turn the screw, the image starts to zoom in or out. However, you will also notice that it blurs. When this happens, you’ll need to adjust the focus screw to make the image clearer. The best practice for approaching this process is to fine-tune the zoom and focus screws incrementally.

IP or Wi-Fi cameras come with a motorized zoom function that enables you to adjust the zoom levels remotely. You can control the system via an app on your smartphone or PC, which is typically simple to use and intuitive. You can find “+” and “-” buttons or use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

These cameras are completely motorized and allow you to move your cameras in all directions. With optical security camera zoom, you can inspect everything around your business or home and obtain more details or broader viewing areas. Some PTZ cameras have a pan range of up to 360 degrees, a tilt range of up to 90 degrees, and a high optical zoom. You can fully manage your security camera remotely from the easy-to-use app.

Unlike optical zoom, digital zoom is an internal image processing function in security cameras handled by the software. Think of Digital zoom as similar to expanding photos on your computer or smartphone. It is achieved by cropping a picture to an area with the same aspect ratio as the original or scaling it up to the original dimensions. All of which happens without modifying the camera optics.

If you would like to delegate this task to our security camera experts, contact Lynx IT. Our team will gladly provide a free quote for adjusting the zoom and focus of your new or existing security camera system.