Haven't used anything newer, but note that once you go past the optical zoom limit and the digital zoom kicks in, the image is going to pixelate as you zoom further in since all it's doing is (more or less) simulating to zoomed image by cropping it and resizing it to full size. The further past the optical zoom limit you get (10x on the SD9), the more the image becomes pixelated and/or blurred.

And I'd personally recommend a tripod when zoomed in that far. Because of how cropped the picture is at 700x, even the slightest movement is going to look like you swung the camcorder more than a few feet :-)