Enlarge Images without Loss

You see on tv where they zoom into the licence plate without any loss of clarity. Is that even possible, and if so, where do I get my hands on that stuff :)

it depends what resolution the picture is.

it would have to be extremely extremely high res with specialised camera's to be able to do zoom in really far on a pic without loss of clarity or pixelating.

well, you know, the survellance camera lookin at the car, and then the cop goes "zoom in right there" and the techy guy goes "sure one sec" then you hear some cheasy computer sounds then its zoomed in and right on the licence plate.

If you have photoshop (or an application which supports photoshop plugins) you can buy a plugin called Genuine Fractals http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=2 which lets you scale up images with very little loss.

My guess is that those sort of camera's shoot at a very high resolution and save the resulting image in a RAW or other 'lossless' format such as TIFF. A lot of consumer digital cameras produce jpeg images, which as a 'lossy' format, means a lot of image data is lost before you have even started. (the more data the easier to enlarge and perform other adjustments on)