@ DrDre,
The problem is that for this methodology no sharpening has been applied.
Maybe it wasn't called "sharpening", but it has been sharpened. If it's not sharpened, sharpen it. It will look oversharpened. Why? Beause it's already sharpened.
The fact that another method may be able to also retrieve these details doesn't take away from this fact.
Does that mean you acknowledge that a traditional denoising and sharpening can achieve (virtually) the same improvement? If it does, there's no point arguing any more, since that's what I was saying from the very beginning.
My problem was that you're happy to compare the results to a simple upscale, but struggle to compare it to more refined methods. If you're so sure of the superiority of superresolution, why's that? But if you're not, it's fine.
Now if you want to argue that super resolution has very little to offer, and that it is mostly due to sharpening and denoising
That was practically my first sentence in this thread...
It's been scientifically proven time and time again that super resolution can retrieve details better than most other methods.
Yeah, on very specific materials. Or maybe NASA does have something that works fine. For us, average humans, it's proven when you can get the thing yourself (the device or the software), take a perfectly average material, run it through, and end up with a result that is impossible to achieve with traditional methods. I've yet to see that happen. At least once... all I and everyone on the video processing forums have seen so far is just papers, theories, and magical results with specific materials noone could duplicate on other sources.
With that being said, there can be gains from superresolution here and there, but very little overall. I really wish it would improve videos significantly, I really wish... I have plenty of materials I could use it on. If only I would be proven wrong!...
You argue my comparison in my last post to the Avisynth Spline64Resize is unfair, but you forgot to mention that I also compared it to the true HD frame. This to me seems like the fairest comparison of all.
I didn't forgot, I was focusing on the unfair comparsion only. The other is fair in its method, but doesn't prove anything. The SW Blu-rays aren't very detailed unfortunately, and your processed frame is oversharpened, so you can't really compare them.