[ChuckMcM]

Sigh. TL;DR version - scaling pixels makes them blocky, scaling vectors doesn't, for some small range of scaling we can keep upscaled pixels not blocky.

Upscaling has a lot of research behind it. Creating a 'vectorized' version of an image (see their paper here: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/47879/1/ID47879.pdf) certainly helps avoid dumb scaling issues. But when you blow it up 7x (like the example) it looks like a cartoon or a bad paint by numbers painting. The issue is that you lose information about the picture when you capture it, and without that information you have to 'make up' what you think would have been there had you been able to capture it. People get a lot of mileage out of the fact that for the most part real world imagery has a lot of linear transitions but there are limits to that as well.

I think the work is interesting but as they say in their paper: "What we have shown already is that there is a viable continuous image format and that it can be used for some conventional operations which are not handled easily in sampled formats." which I agree with, but the pixel is not yet in danger of extinction :-)