It’s a well known trope: Investigator it looking at a fuzzy security cam pic, says ‘enhance that’, and it amazingly sharpens to show the culprit.

I’m playing around with my new camera (Sony HX1) and I’m playing with the zoom out my 8th floor office window at the people leaving the hotel next door. I zoom out fully at the guy on the corner….it’s the equivalent of a 500 mm lens. You couldn’t HOPE to hold a SLR steady, by hand, with an equivalent lens. Push the button and the camera takes six shots in rapid succession, and builds a single sharp image based on them. Pull the card and slap it in the computer and it’s Really Nice. Then I remember it’s a 9 Megapixel image and zoom in on it. You couldn’t tell what brand watch he was wearing, but you might be able to tell his religion. (or what color his hair was under the wig.) Give us another 10-15 years to let the technology trickle down to surveillance equipment and ‘enhance’ might be relabeled to ‘zoom’. Don’t believe me?

Here’s the pic: http://www.millertwinracing.com/SamplePic.jpg