Virtually any modern information-capture device—such as a camera, audio recorder, or telephone—has an analog-to-digital converter in it, a circuit that converts the fluctuating voltages of analog signals into strings of ones and zeroes.

Almost all commercial analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), however, have voltage limits. If an incoming signal exceeds that limit, the ADC either cuts it off or flatlines at the maximum voltage. This phenomenon is familiar as the pops and skips of a “clipped” audio signal or as “saturation” in digital images — when, for instance, a sky that looks blue to the naked eye shows up on-camera as a sheet of white.

At the International Conference on Sampling Theory and Applications, researchers from the MIT Media Lab and the Technical University of Munich presented a technique that they call unlimited sampling, which can accurately digitize signals whose voltage peaks are far beyond an ADC’s voltage limit.