Any opinions on what is a good choice for optical zooms on a typical african safari trip?

Someone said 5x or better- will 5x 6x or 8x optical do it or do you need the more expensive 10 or 12 x optical zoom that some cameras now have (or does that introduce even with Image stabilization) shake.
How close to the animals is typical?

I presume you are talking about a VIDEO camera? We had a Panasonic with 24 times optical zoom. Often, we didn't really need that large a zoom. More important is USING the noise reduction tool to minimize wind noise. Often, we were VERY close to animals. When you look at my regular pictures, most of them were taken with a 75 to 300 zoom lens, often NOT zoomed out all the way. We were often within 10 feet of cats, 20 feet of elephants, further away with some prey animals, like zebra, etc..

Thanks
no not talking about a video camera but a regular dig still camera
anyone else use a still camera with an optical zoom?

Edward, OK, sorry. We used a Nikon D70 SLR, which does not have a zoom, just interchangeable lenses. I used a 75 X 300 most of the time.

We saw quite a few people with digital cameras that were not slr type. The cameras ran the spectrum. I would get the largest opitical zoom that you can afford and not less than 4 mega pixels.

Some of the cameras allow (not all and probably not most) for a third party doubler -- but if you would use one of those, be sure to get use to if first as they do change the picture somewhat so they take some getting used to. But with digital it is easy to practice and throw away the test photos, not like you have to actually print them to do the testing.