Google broke the internet photos and then fixed them

Blurry, pixellated photos can now become a thing of the past. Let’s reflect on all the years we had to live with them.

Computer: Enhance

It has become cliché in the 90’s crime TV shows to have someone looking through a pixellated camera feed, point at something and say “enhance this”. Back then it was laughable, as we all knew there wasn’t really any extra data in those pixels to enhance from.

Besides, if there was a higher quality or resolution, why show the pixellated version in the first place?

Cliché turned into a joke

When I started working as a designer in the early 2000’s, the highest, popular resolution for design was 1024x768, so naturally everything was a bit pixellated. We didn’t need high resolution photos, because there were no screens to benefit from them at the time.

Games

Growing up on old Atari games, the jump in fidelity was hard to miss. It felt as great as tech will go back at the time.