Tech Nostalgia: SonyStyle Store Pictures from 2003

I was looking at my photo archives and found some Sony Clié pictures I took at a SonyStyle store in downtown Chicago. Sadly the EXIF doesn’t say which Clié model it is. As expected, the original pictures are pretty low-res at 640x480 and pretty poor quality, but that’s what we had back then. #old

A view of the Sony aibo (robot dog) display at an old SonyStyle store in downtown Chicago, with flat-screened TVs on a stair-stepped display showing aibo pictures or video with actual aibo robots set up on platforms between the TVs

I’m going to upload these original pictures to a Flickr album for others to enjoy, but I remembered that I have some photo enhancing software from Topaz that can upsample images and perform other enhancements like noise removal, sharpening, and others. I wondered what would happen if I piped the Clié pictures through, and I was impressed by the results. Below is one enhanced example:

Similar picture as above, but the picture quality looks much cleaner, with sharper details.

Of course there’s a limit to the improvements the software can offer (and I have an older version of the software that is probably missing several newer features), but considering the way the original picture looked, I am mighty impressed. You can check out the rest of the pictures on Flickr.

I’ll probably upload more old techie pictures from my photo archives later, with the originals and enhanced versions for fun, so keep an eye out, if you’re into old techie stuff like this. 🙂