Good News, Everyone!
I've created a new jQuery plugin to handle image zooming, like you find on many e-commerce sites.
Unlike many of the zoom plugins I've found, this one uses the mystical power of the forbidden Canvas Element to accomplish much of it's dirty work. It also takes advantage of Ben Alman's $.throttle() plugin to keep events bound to mouse-move in check.
It relies on a larger source image by default, which is loaded asyncronously and then translated onto the canvas element, which guides the zoomed selection. If you don't have a larger image, that's ok too. In that case it's probably a good idea to scale down your image with css, and ql_zoom will handle the rest. Currently, the image needs to be wrapped in a container tag; I'd recommend a figure tag.
Here's how to invoke it:
$('.image-container').ql_zoom(options);
...where `options` is an object containing parameters.