while the camera does seem totally screwed lately (randomly spazzing off into nowhere), there is an intersting side effect. this may have been in here for much longer, but it doesn't seem to have been brought up recently.
by default, there's a limit how far you can zoom in on something in the distance. i was testing this with my draw distance is at 128, and it seems you can't zoom in very well on things further than about 64 meters. however, you can use a 'telescope' to zoom in further...
make a simple prim, stretch it out, make it a blank surface, and max out the transparency. move it about so it's positioned in between the item you wish to zoom in on and the current camera position (and it should be close enough to be able to zoom in on fully). zoom in on the part of the prim over the target object. keep zooming... while it slows down at first, it'll suddenly zoom in much further; i could read text on a poster almost the full draw distance away.
with a pre-positioned lens and cylinder, you could make a nice telescope to point out distant objects =)
on another random note; zooming in on something outside of 64 meters or so will sometimes result in the camera suddenly zooming back out very far, sometimes then looping back to the zoomed in view over and over. very bizzare.