Question: what is 2x optical zoom?
Answer: When you zoom in you take a crop of a portion of the scene and make it take up the whole image. Of course its done optically so you don't lose quality. When you zoom in 2X you capture 1/2 the height and 1/2 the width of your original scene. So 2X zoom means you can only capture 1/4 of the 1X image.