Steve Litchfield

This is probably a niche - but also common need in the tech world. At least for old-timers like me, capturing video back in the dawn of smartphones and, even before, with VHS tape capture (for example from camcorders) in the 1990s. What we've ended up with, in 2025, passed down from our old computers and, quite probably, the computers before those, on CDRs and old hard disks, a number of low resolution videos that look hopelessly out of place in the modern world. So, typically, there would be a family video captured at 288p. (240p and 320p are also common.) The 'p' is how we talk about lines of horizontal pixels in a video, and for comparison 'modern' (i.e. post 2000) DVD is 480p in the USA and 576p in the UK. While genuinely modern video content online in 2025 is almost all 1080p or above (e.g. 4K, at 1440p). Quite a jump. So what the heck do we do with all our old (e.g.) 288p home videos? I mean, they're priceless in that - usually - there's no way to reca...

Long time readers of my scribblings on camera phones will know my passion for photos to be captured as they look in reality, not in some high contrast, over-saturated, edge-enhanced version of reality. Sure, the latter look better on 6" phone screens. That's why these trends have become common. But the photos themselves are terrible in terms of image quality. By which I mean they've been messed around to look great on the phone or embedded in a narrow social web feed but you can't do anything else with them. Say you want to use a section of the photo only, cropping in to a group of people or an object in a scene. Or you want to show the photo on a large desktop display or TV. Good luck with that with a photo grabbed at 12MP on an iPhone or Pixel or Samsung flagship with all default settings. You'll see artefacts, jagged borders where there should be none, and general 'over-processing'. Which is why I applauded Nokia's 'PureView' approach ten yea...