"Undeveloped film?" Pretty sure that's not what you guys mean. Maybe you mean the negatives, which are different.

Well let's see if anyone can remember the show, because it was so ridiculous it had me in tears. Think it might have been Numb3rs.

Obviously it was a crime-investigation-type show, and if memory serves the murder took place at some rich beach house. They had a picture of a woman lying face down in a bath tub with the water pouring, complete with bubbles. And so, naturally, the magical computer guy manages to zoom in, get it to crystal clear quality, rotate the picture's depth, then claim that they could reconstruct the face based off the reflections off the rush of colorless bubbles. And, again, it manages to wave a few green lines over with little pixels-unblurring effect, and they get a beautifully crisp image of the girls face. All done in a couple seconds with algorithms and science!

Interessting thing: Even the Enhance Button seems to bow to narrative casuality. Recently (at least where I live, we're a bit behind with the epsiodes) in an episode of CSI: NY (The episode with the vampires) they had a photograph on which the potential weapon was pictured, yet (as that would have made the episode several minutes shorter) they couldn't enhance it right away. Instead, we get a quote along the lines of this: "Try and download a program from the internet to enhance it."

The Lytro camera with it's "light field capture technique" allows refocusing an image on any point after the fact. This involves recording a lot more data than a regular photo of similar resolution, and uses a rather more complex file format.

Arstechnica has covered the Lytro technology in a couple of articles: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/10/lytros-new-light-field-camera-lets-you-focus-after-you-take-a-picture.ars http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/01/lytros-quirky-camera-is-equal-bits-awkward-fun.ars