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Google’s finally rolling out the Zoom Enhance camera trick it announced last year

The sci-fi cliche is finally real — but does it actually work?

Apparently, turning the cliched “enhance!” meme into reality wasn’t as easy as Google might have initially expected. As my former colleague Jon Porter wrote last year, enhance has been seen in “ countlesssci-fi movies and police procedural shows that have shown characters zooming impossibly far into photos to reveal clues and details that simply could not have been present in the original image.” The example of Zoom Enhance in Google’s latest blog post isn’t exactly mind-blowing, so it’s possible the company has dialed back its ambitions while developing this feature. Zoom Enhance joins a slew of new camera software tricks coming to Google’s new Pixels — like Add Me, Reimagine in Magic Editor, and more — and this time, all of them will be available when the phones ship.

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