Why don’t they just enhance the license plate? Honestly, this is first-year CSI stuff

The title of this post comes from a commenter at BoingBoing, where I first saw this video posted.

But I was much more interested when I read some of the other comments. First of all, someone links to this extremely funny example of “CSI zoom” (if your browser automatically shrinks the image to fit on your screen, click to zoom to full-size, and then scroll down).

And then somebody else mentions that, actually, if you’re working from a video, you can interpolate things like license plates, even if they are very blurry, by cross checking and compiling a few dozen frames. The only video I could find of that effect was this one, which takes 128 pictures of the moon with a standard dSLR:

Wow!

I also found this webpage, from 2d3, which apparently markets a similar product to government and industry.