Originally Posted by
TimothyH
You are probably the right person to ask... How do some cameras in this price range have 40x optical zoom while others have 3x or 4x? Is there a trade off somewhere else when a camera has 40x as opposed to 4x?
As a general rule lenses with narrower zoom range are sharper and have less unpleasantness like flare, chromatic aberration, coma, etc. The world's best lenses don't zoom (at all). It's easier to optimize a stack of glass for the 70 to 200 mm range than it is to optimize it for 14 to 480 mm.