Apparently the camera is "2 in 1" that does 2x zoom with "optical quality" but they never actually say it's true optical zoom. I'm guessing that it's just digital zoom with some fancy processing. Does anyone know for sure?
I'm curious what you think digital zoom is if not cropping.
Presumably the standard image on the 16e converts the 48 MP sensor into a 12 MP image with less noise because they bin 4 sensor pixels into 1 pixel in the image file. So a 12 MP crop on the 48 MP sensor would result in a zoomed image with the same 12 MP resolution as the standard image. A major drawback would be higher image noise, but nobody will see a reduction in image pixels. At the end of the day it's probably somewhere between true optical zoom and a 12 MP native sensor with a crop.
While I don't think it's right to call these crops "optical zoom", the quality is typically pretty good.