There is optical zoom and digital zoom, optical zoom uses the optics of the camera just like a 35mm type of camera, digital zoom is pretty much like zooming in on a picture in Photoshop or other similar program. It pixelates images pretty bad when the digital zoom is used over the top of optical zoom. I have turned off the digital zoom in my cameras after using it once, the picture quality degrades rapidly.
I looked for the largest optical zoom that I could find when I bought a new camera this fall to replace a 6 year old 2mp Panasonic that had seen its fair share of abuse. I bought a
Panasonic DMC-FZ7K, it is a 6mp camera with a 12x optical zoom and does video clips. I am still learning the idiosyncrasies that all cameras have but like it so far.