Why I hate CSI:New York

Posted by bb on Friday 16th of January 2009 at 4:58 pm;.
Filed Under Rants 

Being UK based, we are a little behind our US cousins when it comes to new series of US based shows. Channel 5 has just started showing season 5 of CSI:New York (the one with Gary Sinise in).

As a self confessed geek, I like a certain degree of believability in my crime drama. I can overlook quite a lot, upto and including the ridiculous noises that the computers make whilst flashing up the mugshot of everyone in the AFIS system. After all, it must be much quicker to pull the image of the offender, their finger prints, the comparison fingerprints and display it all rather than just having a little progress bar.

Progress Bar

Like This?

Fortunately the AFIS system is obviously blessed with unlimited bandwidth and disk speed 😉 An annoyance, but still overlook-able.

What is less able to be forgiven is when they start messing around with ‘image enhancement’. I realise I am not alone on the intertubes when I moan about how cunswuppily ridiculous the image enhancement is, but it may surprise you to know that it is not the fact that they can produce high resolution images from any input (upto and including reading the text on a badge that was reflected off the sunglasses of the person using an ATM machine :o) but when they flat out contradict each other!

The particular scene that made me remember exactly why I had given up on CSI:New York was not the 3D holographic body that they now use in the morgue (sigh) but when the ‘perp’ was escaping in a stolen car. Apparently at some point he had to pass a toll bridge at which point he dropped his money and opened the car door to retrieve it. When he bent down to collect the money his face was captured on the security camera. Apparently they were unable to enhance the image enough to be able to ‘see’ his face, but there was sufficient detail in the enhanced image to perform a biometric comparison to establish it was the perp they were after.

So far, so surprisingly real.

Until they zoom in and read the VIN number off the door of the car …

So … Let me get this straight … you can zoom in and read something like this :


… but not far enough to actually identify the perp.

Feck off ….


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