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Let's Enhance

Duncan Robson
Comedy
YouTube
Cited on HN 11 times, 2010–2025, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Used as a joke or critique whenever someone expects impossible image upscaling or recovery of detail.

A two-minute compilation of TV and film scenes where investigators say 'enhance' and a blurry image becomes sharp. It mocks the trope.

2 critical · 9 jokes · Comedy

11 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@btilly Apr 2010 Pushes back
on HN thread CSI Effect: How Forensic Science on TV Impacts Our Real Justice System
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.
@jere Oct 2012 Pushes back
on HN thread Restoration of defocused and blurred images
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.
@novas0x2a Mar 2010 Makes a joke
on HN thread 26-gigapixel panorama of Paris; try zooming in near the horizon
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]
@sp332 Dec 2010 Makes a joke
on HN thread Pixel Art Scaling Algorithms
"Uncrop" isn't from Blade Runner, it's Red Dwarf. [link] Which was making fun of... well, all of these: [this video] :-) And everyone knows that Deckard was looking at a live feed from a video camera, not enhancing a still image.
@npunt Feb 2017 Makes a joke
on HN thread Runner Disqualified After Claiming 2nd Place in Fort Lauderdale Half Marathon
Read more
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]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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