Sony Invent Esper

Good news for all of you who’ve ever wanted to sit in front of a murky screen, in a darkened apartment, zooming in on a photograph of a stripper’s bedroom – Sony have developed a chip that lets viewers pan, zoom and enhance TV images.

Demonstrated in Tokyo yesterday, the Digital Reality Creation Multifunction v2 technology (DRC-MFv2)– modest name there – keeps the picture sharp by using image enhancement processes, rather than just stretching the scan lines, so there’s no loss of detail that might result in you retiring a human by mistake. With DRC, one pixel can become 36.

There’s no word when TV’s featuring the technology will appear, but you can bet it’ll be around the time that the first HD pornography hits the market. Voice-operated will be extra.

The DRC-MFv2

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?