A sci-fi fan who absorbs himself in unrealistic plot ideas is calling a show dumb for exaggeration? Come on. You have to do better than that. Everyone knows how it really works. I suppose it would be better to let each show last the days and weeks it really takes for fingerprints and DNA evidence to go through the system.
Oh that's the least of its problems. Obviously they compress time in all of these crime shows, that's a given. I can even ignore the fact that they're CSI guys who also do the interrogation and field work with guns catching bad guys, again it's just the nature of those procedural crime shows. But the show is just. SO. FUCKING. RETARDED. I mean, the scifi stuff I watch doesn't even pass itself off as the real world, and it's actually based in more accurate real world science that the garbage they make up in CSI.
They do stuff that even makes the cliche "enhance image" cliche look realistic by comparison. I recall one time they had a photo of a guy's ear and ran it through some magic software to generate a height map which they used to print a full 3D ear including the underwrap and used it to match to a custom made ear thingy the guy had.
First of all, a single photo cannot extrapolate 3 dimensional data like that, especially not from that resolution photo. MAYBE with photogrammetry, but the circumstances would have to be ridiculous for that to even work at all let alone work accurately at that scale. Secondly, it showed it generating a simple extruded height displacement map. So how the hell did it generate the obstructed parts of the ear? Hilarious.
And some of those early CSI:NY episodes were absolute gold too. There was one where they had a video, and they caught a guy because of a reflection in the NTSC overscan region that nobody saw. Their "overscan" made the image like 50% wider. If you know about safe frames, overscan is maybe like 5% percent either side. Secondly, they managed to detect a dude's face in a tiny reflection. It's SD NTSC. Ok, so I guess they still heavily relied on the good old "enhance" trope too.
There was another one I can't quite remember where I recall they somehow made a full 3D recreation of the crime scene and triangulated a sniper's position over a long distance from how a horse fell?
So many episodes relied on some made up piece of software as a magical plot device to do some stupidly specialized and impossible task that anyone with a concept of similar real world software would realize is complete fantasy.
At the end of an episode, I always liked to think about the hypothetical court case that would try to get a conviction with the flimsy circumstantial evidence they made up in half of these episodes.