Video is only 640×480, so how can Snappy get 1500 x 1125 resolution?
Actually, video ISN’T 640×480. This is a common misconception in the computer world. Fortunately the Emmy award-winning engineers on Team Snappy are true broadcast video gurus. Members of Team Snappy have been designing video capture devices since the early 80’s including products designed for and sold by Apple and IBM. Play’s research into Snappy yielded dozens of breakthroughs in the art of video image capture. The technical nitty-gritty is as follows: NTSC video is an analog signal with no fixed resolution. The more times you sample the signal the better your digital representation gets. Thanks to a fellow named Nyquist, we can calculate based on the bandwidth of video that the point of diminishing returns is reached around 1500 samples per line. To sample at this resolution, Play designed our own custom chip for Snappy. It’s called the HD-1500 and it’s a big part of why Snappy’s images look so great. The other secret is the advanced mathematics incorporated in the software. The tim
