Ooooh, bitmapping. In later episodes, did they do jpegging, giffing and tiffing?
The whole thing is complete Hollywood hogwash. Worst example I saw was an episode of Earth: Final Conflict in which they zoom in on a picture of a kidnap victim and get a perfectly recognizable reflection of the kidnapper… off the victim’s eyeball.
Okaaaay… this show is set in the near future, so many cameras are super-duper high tech, and the victim was an alien, so maybe his eyeballs are particularly reflective…
The first place I saw it was in Bladerunner, where Harrison Ford’s character uses the voice-activated computer to whiz around and zoom in on the replicant’s pictures. That was in 1982, and I think that pre-dates MacGuyner.
In Bladerunner I could kinda accept it. This is supposed to be taking place in the ill-defined future, so I could accept that they had some super-resolving photo format, maybe not even using any normal sort of emulsion or pixels, but maybe something exotic. but I try not to think about it too hard, lest the cold light of logic wither the fragile bloom of artsy speculation.
You can do amazing things with sharpening if you’re just looking for specific detail. Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask is much better than the old-school sharpening algorithms.
You can do amazing things with video that you can’t do with still photos. You have many images from the same sensor over time and they can be merged into a single higher quality image. You can eliminate noise, camera shake, etc.
I can’t help thinking of a scene in the Mel Brooks movie High Anxiety, in which a character is trying to make out a small detail (a man’s face) in a picture of a large hotel lobby. Instead of enlarging just that portion, he keeps enlarging the entire picture until he has a billboard-sized photo.