checked net zoom levels

Crunched some numbers... Been wondering about this for a while. Does the Live View on the computer as provided by the Canon EOS Utility software, given it only goes to 200%, offer anything more than the camera's built-in zoom feature, which can go up to 10 times.

I noted the screen size of various devices. That is, the diagonal measure, in inches.

• camera: 3
• laptop: 14
• netbook: 10

Again, we must consider the maximum zoom level of the device, the 40D camera, or the tethered computer running the control software with the Live View active.

• camera: 10x
• computer: 2x

So, if my math makes sense, one simply multiples the diagonal by the max zoom to get the the effective size, in inches.

• camera: 30
• laptop: 28
• netbook: 20

Damn. I knew it! That means the laptop I have (John Kim Chi) gets close to the zoom level of the camera itself but is still less. The netbook (John Phil) with the small form factor, of course, can only zoom to 2/3rds the level of the camera. Damn.

It's actually worse than that. The EOS Utility software does not let the Live View fill the entire computer monitor space. So there's some further loss. Maybe the laptop is more like 25" and the netbook 15".

I was fooled initially by the different conventions! 200% just seems bigger.

The upshot of all this is that showing the zoomed Live View on the computer screen, unless you have a monitor larger than 15", does not offer any benefit.

Thus the whole premise of relying on the computer screen to help achieve good focus is weakened.

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Now, all that said, the 40D display is not very... deep, in terms of pixels.

• camera: 230 000
• laptop: 1 470 000
• netbook: 786 432

So, the computer screens should have better resolution.

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This makes for a compelling argument for running the netbook in 1024x768 mode, with panning. That effectively bumps up the screen size. Every little bit will help.

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Backwards computed the dimensions of the camera LCD, given it's 4:3 ratio. It is approx. 554x416 pixels.