That works for most people, but pros find they need more. Most use reusable, removable storage like the SmartMedia flash memory card or IBM's Microdrive. These storage cards can hold hundreds of shots, fit in your wallet and be reused over and over. Generally, cameras use USB or serial ports to download images. Our better models have USB, which is faster than serial.
Some people use flash media readers.
Optical zoom actually gets a closer shot, while digital zoom essentially just crops an image tighter. There's 3x optical zoom, plus up to 9x digital. But shots can get muddy at maximum zoom. Interpolation adds pixels to an image, making it easier to enlarge. But it doesn't make the image sharper.