I understand that digital zoom degrades quality and it is no substitute for an optical zoom, however, wouldn't it be possible to do a high quality digital zoom with an HD camcorder, during SD recording? Wouldn't it be possible to maintain quality and crisspness of SD without sacrificing the resolution?

It is easy enough to crop HDV footage for better framing in SD, without having digital artifacts and resolution loss, so wouldn't a digital zoom be a decent option for wildlife filming in sd? It would allow an 80x zoom with no loss in quality in theory. All of the extra pixels are currently being downsampled anyway, can't they be utilized for this?

Forgive me if I am missing something but it seems like a feature that a few people would desire and seems like it would be easily implemented.

No one has a response? Is it a silly question, or is it already being implemented in some of the consumer hdv camcorders?

It's not a silly question, Holly, but the fact is that such a feature simply isn't available on the XH series camcorders. The Sony V1U has an extended zoom feature, but not the Canon XH G1 or A1.