Using Optical Encoders to Improve Camera Phone Zoom Lens Accuracy

A wide range of commercial applications use cameras with a zooming mechanism. Perhaps the most ubiquitous is the camera phone. Camera phones may have an optical zoom, a digital zoom, or both. What’s the difference? An optical zoom actually changes the effective focal length of the camera lens such that the original image is magnified and could be captured by the image sensor (CCD or CMOS). With greater magnification, the light is spread across the entire image sensor and all of the pixels can be used. An optical zoom could be interpreted as a true zoom that will improve the quality of pictures captured.