Duncan Robson
11 HN mentions · mentioned in 11 months, 2010–2025
1:44 · 3.8M views · Dec 13, 2009
A two-minute compilation of TV and film scenes where investigators say 'enhance' and a blurry image becomes sharp. It mocks the trope.
Used as a joke or critique whenever someone expects impossible image upscaling or recovery of detail.
11 comments from Hacker News
Thanks to CSI and relatives, here is what the public thinks image manipulation can do: this video The ridiculousness may be lost on you if you need an explanation why a digital image of a crappy security camera can't be used to zoom in on a reflection of an eyeball. Or of why a 2-dimensional image can't be used to construct a 3-dimensional image of the scene, that you can rotate to see objects out of the line of view of the camera.
The whole "Enhance" trope is still completely stupid. this video [LINK] >But the Enhance Button simply ignores the fact that the big blocky pixels you get when you zoom in too close on a picture are the only information that the picture actually contains, and attempting to extract more detail than this is fundamentally impossible. No matter what you do or how you do it, you're merely guessing, if not making stuff up outright.
I didn't mean 'obsessive' as a smear, more that they were dogged in their pursuit, going as far as crunching biometrics and zooming in on a watch for evidence (enhance.. enhance.. [1]). It was an entertaining read since it looked eerily similar to how conspiracy sites construct their hilarious conclusions. And yet, it was real. Also, 'relatively innocent' was meant in context of buying instagram followers, not in cheating. > I'm more disturbed with the evident impulse to forgive. Is nothing important any more? Is character and honesty so worthless? The thing I'm most disturbed by in these threads is how easily nuance is lost to the power of righteous indignation. It's like we're reading an entirely different set of comments. [1] this video
Gigapan.org has a snapshot feature for that. 26-gigapixel is bigger than most (all?) of what Gigapan has, but they have a bunch more. The Obama inauguration one[1] is probably their most famous. I don't really ever get tired of being able to "enhance! enhance!"[2] an image. 1) [LINK] 2) this video
Then you can "Enhance". this video Joking aside, this does illustrate the "magical" properties of technology to the layperson. As a corollary, failure modes end up quite suprising and hard to reason about without a certain amount of proficiency in these technologies.