Synchrotron-based microtomography provides high resolution, but the resolution in large samples is often limited by the detector field of view and the pixel size. For some samples, only a small region of interest is relevant and local tomography is a powerful approach for retaining high resolution. Two methods are truncated tomography and zoom-in tomography. In this article we use existing theoretical results to estimate the error present in truncated and zoom-in tomographic reconstructions. These errors agree with the errors calculated from exact tomographic reconstructions. We argue in a heuristic manner why zoom-in tomography is superior to the truncated tomography in terms of the reconstruction error. However, the theoretical formula is not usable in practice because it requires the complete high-resolution reconstruction to be known. To solve this problem we proposed a practical method for estimating the error in zoom-in and truncated tomographies. The results using this estimation method are in very good agreement with our experimental results.