a magnifying glass or a microscope could have picked up the very small details, even at 1000x, if needed to see the date on the paper? .
Also, notice the first two enlargements are 100x and 140x but the paper is just a blur in them, the banner headlines at those magnifications should have been readable as more and more detail was enlarged. Am I right or am I missing something?
i quit watching about halfway through. tell me what happened!
shareA magnifying glass only enlarges the existing image, it doesn't enhance it. In a small print of an entire photo, the magnifying glass simply wouldn't reveal tiny details (like the newspaper's date) because the print itself isn't detailed enough. However with the original negative, you can blow up a certain section and produce a print containing every last detail from the negative.
One crude comparison is, think of a digital pic, say 20 mpx. You can view it at full size and see the text on tiny faraway street signs. The resolution is so high it could be printed on a poster. But if you make a tiny print of the image, you wouldn't be able to make out these details even with a magnifying glass, because it's shrunk too much and even the highest resolution print wouldn't be clear enough.
As for why the original two enlargements in the movie were blurry, but the last one was sharp - yep, I wondered that too. I can only guess for dramatic effect.
Simply blowing up the photo won't enhance it. The negative would have been better but they said they couldn't find it. A magnifying glass would have been as good as it gets. Trying to read the date was silly because it's too small and because, as was pointed out earlier, the general layout of the paper was clearly visible at the lower magnifications and all they needed to do was compare it to those from a few different dates.
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