What specific type of iPhone lens should you use if you want to zoom in close on a distant object without making the picture look digitally blurry?

To zoom in close on a distant object without making the picture look digitally blurry, you should use the iPhone's Telephoto lens. This specific lens provides optical zoom. Optical zoom works by using actual physical glass lens elements within the camera system to magnify the scene *beforethe image is captured by the camera's sensor. This means the Telephoto lens has a longer focal length, which is a measure of how strongly the lens converges or diverges light, effectively bringing distant objects closer in the field of view. For example, when an iPhone offers a '3x' or '5x' zoom option and you select it, the camera app switches to the dedicated Telephoto lens that physically captures this magnified view. Because the magnification occurs optically, the sensor records a larger, more detailed version of the distant subject, preserving the image's sharpness and clarity. In contrast, digital zoom operates by cropping a central portion of an image captured by a wider lens and then enlarging that cropped section to fill the entire frame. This process simply stretches existing pixels and does not add any new detail, inevitably leading to a loss of sharpness, pixelation, and the 'digitally blurry' appearance you want to avoid.