Digital Zoom in cameras VS. Photoshop zoom (crop and resize)

I've had a feeling before that it might be better for me to take a photo in natural state without the digital zoom (I have yet to date ever owned a digital camera with optical zoom >.<) and then zoom it in Photoshop by cropping and resizing or re-sampling. I got this idea because I found that Photoshop could zoom better quality than other cheaper or basic photo editing tools, maybe Photoshop has better algorithms or simple the psychological idea that $1000 software is better at zooming a picture than a free one.

Here is an article for some food for thought next time when your using that digital zoom on that camera. I'll find something interesting to take a photo of soon and show you the differences with a Nokia 6220 Digital zoom VS. Adobe Photoshop 7.0


Article: http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/digitalimaging/f/digitalzoom.htm


Here are the sample pics, can you guess which is which?:

One is taken with

• Digital zoom
  
• Macro mode without d zoom
• Auto mode without d zoom.

(Not in order of appearance), which would you say is best? (DO NOT CLICK THUMBNAILS)


Auto mode without digital zoom, photoshop cropped



Digital Zoomed



Macro mode without digital zoom, photoshop cropped

Press CTRL + A to reveal answers OR Click thumbnails

I will post these on my Facebook and poll my IT and non-It friends and see what their opinions are before telling them the results.

The results are: macro mode without digital zoom, photoshop cropped

The way I see it is the digital zoom adds a soften filter to make the image less grainy and pixey but in turn makes the image less clear and sharp for large screen viewing. So it could be safe to say that not all digital zoom are weak? You could find one that uses the same algorithm as Photoshop and in that way have exactly the same effect?

As you can see the digital zoom one had bad croping from my shaky hands, I will continue to NOT use digital zoom and crop the pictures myself for a safer and better cropping as I can control what I do want and don't want after the picture was taken but if you screw up during the digital zoom the rest of the data is lost at the time you take the photo.

But.. for those who don't want to muck around with software then thats really the whole point digital zoom was invented, that and also it fools unexpecting consumers into thinking it has zoom.

Do you agree?