OPT FOR OPTICAL - ZOOM THAT IS

I was recently asked by a friend to clarify the difference between optical zoom and digital zoom. He had been told by a mutual acquaintance that the two terms were essentially the same. In short, zoom is zoom. Well, not exactly. In fact, there are very important differences. Basically, optical zoom is zoom. Digital zoom is not. Say you have one dozen flowers. You want to zoom in on a single flower. With optical zoom, you essentially magnify the image until the single flower fills the sensor. On the other hand, with digital zoom, what you are actually doing is cropping the image. So what's the problem with that? Cropping the image, assuming that the final result is printed at a given size, degrades the image.So, it's a no brainer. Opt (no pun intended) for optical xoom.