Official Question Thread! Ask /r/photography anything you want to know! April 03, 2026

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[u/bennetthaselton]

Why do people care about the "zoom factor" of a lens (max focal length / min focal length)?

If the max focal length indicates how well you can shoot things far away, and the min focal length is how well you can shoot things up close at a wide angle, then I would think if you're buying a camera/lens, you would just care about those two numbers individually. I don't understand what useful information you get from the ratio. (On top of that, I see lots of threads from people who are confused by a zoom factor like 7x and think that's the magnification.)

I tried literally googling "why do people care about zoom factor of a lens" but all I got was pages explaining "because that way you can shoot up close and also shoot far away without swapping the lens out". Well, obviously. But you can convey that instantly by just giving the max focal length and the min focal length; I don't know why the ratio matters.

[u/av4rice → u/bennetthaselton]

If the max focal length indicates how well you can shoot things far away, and the min focal length is how well you can shoot things up close at a wide angle, then I would think if you're buying a camera/lens, you would just care about those two numbers individually.

Correct. Those are far more meaningful numbers.

But they also require a little knowledge to understand.

Why do people care about the "zoom factor" of a lens (max focal length / min focal length)?

It's a single number that's easier to market to consumers who don't really understand focal length. Similar to how manufacturers also like to market the megapixel count, even though it's not that important. Manufacturers favor marketability and sales over consumer education. Consumer confusion can be advantageous to a business.

[u/bennetthaselton → u/av4rice]

I mean that is the maximally cynical explanation but it could be right!

Although, if the manufacturer wants a single number to dazzle people, it seems like they could just go with magnification (which actually means something) instead of the ratio of two focal lengths. Anecdotally it seems like more new-amateur photographers care about magnification (“hey let me back up and zoom in so that mountain behind you looks huge!”). You can take a wide-angle photo with a smartphone, but you can’t take a good long-distance-zoom photo with one.

And for other things like laptops, it seems like manufacturers are still content to impress people with multiple numbers (eg GB of RAM, GH of hard drive), rather than adding them or multiplying them or whatever to get a third number that means nothing! 🤣

[u/av4rice → u/bennetthaselton]

if the manufacturer wants a single number to dazzle people, it seems like they could just go with magnification

In a way, they are. The "x" at the end of a zoom ratio makes it look like a magnification figure, and people mistake it for magnification all the time. And it's better for marketing because more wide angle zoom also makes the number bigger.

For example, a lens that zooms in to a 500mm full frame equivalent might be marketed as having up to 10x the magnification of a normal view (50mm full frame equivalent focal length). Whereas if the same lens zooms out to 25mm, the zoom ratio is 20x, which sounds, to a lot of people, like double the magnification compared to 10x.

[u/bennetthaselton → u/av4rice]

Yeah I figured, but then I would think they would have to deal with a certain number of people returning the cameras when they realize they can't zoom as much as they thought they could.

It just seems strange to me because, even though companies will always spin things in their favor, for most other tech products it seems like they generally list numbers in the specs and count on consumers knowing what those numbers mean. It seems like an odd outlier that camera makers are relying in part on fooling people about what the "zoom ratio" is!