Every camera has FREE Digital Zoom

The simple feature found in almost all image processing software normally called cropping, givens every camera owner access to a digital zoom. Like the much maligned in camera digital zoom feature there are limits. If you zoom in too far your image becomes blocky, noisy and fuzzy, The digital camera will probably have an interpolation built into it6s functions that tries to smooth out and sharpen the image as you zoom in. It will also possibly resize the interpolated output. Another common image processing tool sharpen might help extend the zoom range just a little on your cropped image. However don’t go overboard with sharpening (it can introduce unfortunate edge effects at contrast boundaries in the image)
So here is a recent example, I was taking a wide multi-image panoramic view, with my normal lens 50mm (75mm equivalent to a 35mm) Then I notice some swan flying past in formation and with no time to change lenses I just snapped an image (of them way in the distance, see image above). I then cropped this in picasa and added just a slight tweak of sharpening. The result is not satisfactory to blow up but looks fine at 15 by 10cm (6” by 4”) the standard photo processing snap shot size