The Digital Camera Revolution
Instead of imitating film counterparts, new technologies work with light in creative ways
Take a grainy, blurred image of a formless face or an illegible license plate, and with a few keystrokes the picture sharpens and the killer is caught — if you’re a crime-scene tech on TV. From Harrison Ford in Blade Runner to CSI, Criminal Minds and NCIS, the zoom-and-enhance maneuver has become such a staple of Hollywood dramas that it’s mocked with video montages on YouTube.
In real life, of course, no amount of high-techery can disclose data not captured by a camera in the first place. But scientific advances are now gaining ground on fictional forensics. The field known as computational photography has exploded in the last decade, yielding powerful new cameras capable of tricks once seen only in the labs of make-believe.
For a long time camera makers and operators focused mostly on getting more pixels. But the “pixel war” is over, says Marc Levoy, a pioneer in computational photography at Stanford University. Today’s manufacturers are looking beyond good resolution.