@ RU.08

Although your upscale is much smoother and certainly removes many of the artifacts in present in the source, it introduces an unrealistic smoothness to the frame. In that sense it literally is a smoothed and cleaned up low resolution image on steriods. There is none of the detail or structure present that is native to high resolution images. In a sense you eliminate both the gain and the cost of my methodology, but essentially introduce a different cost. I guess it's a question of preference. Personally, I prefer mine (big surprise), but I can understand why you would prefer yours. That's why I would indeed describe yours as a "proper" upscale, but mine as a "proper" high res reconstruction.

However to get a better sense of the quality perception of the upscale/reconstruction, it would be interesting to see yours in motion and compare it to mine. I would say take the low res sample I put up and upscale it with your method for a proper comparison.