This is utterly fascinating, thank you so much!
And... oh my god you're right about the resolution. I was right about the Sony unit at hand (PDW-F350); the specifications say it's a 1440x1080 imager. But a tape-based Panasonic camera (AJ-HDX900) from within a year or two? It shoots 1080p 30fps and 1080i 60fps off of three 1280x720 CCDs. I almost want to compare full 1440x1080 footage out of the cameras side-by-side just to see if there's a real difference—the Panasonic puts nearly three times the bitrate of the Sony onto tape and shoots 4:2:2 instead of 4:2:0, but it's producing at least some of its resolution via Magic™

(actually, now that I think about it, I bet it's doing something clever with the tri-CCD design to get extra detail...)

i thought widescreen dvd video was actually coded at 848×480? which would be almost-square pixels…

So I use a Panasonic Lumix GH6 as my main camera, and it has a pixel shift mode that gets 100MP stills out of a 25MP sensor. The thing is, it requires near-total stillness or else it fails, it caps the ISO at 1600 to control noise, and more importantly, this two-year-old camera needs to sit and churn for a solid fifteen seconds or more after every single shot just to process the exposures and stitch them together into the final image in-camera. And notably, that 1600iso maximum is on a cutting-edge, modern 4/3" sensor with crazy analog-stage tricks to improve its performance... although the resolution makes it hard to speculate about noise because the photosites are less than a third of the size by my napkin math (3μm across instead of ~12μm)

It is incredibly interesting to me that Panasonic has been using this technology for so long—it also explains why they tend to be better at it than the competition, being the first to ship cameras that can do it handheld afaik—and I theorized it might be possible in video, but actually doing it, in 2005, with in-camera image processing is completely insane. And in a relatively compact camera, too.... I can't help but wonder what sort of crazy ASICs they've got going on inside that thing to make it work at all. Even though the resolution is far, far lower, by more than an order of magnitude, I image image processing of raw 0.5MP and 2MP frames at 30 or 60fps wasn't anything close to free in that era. Not to mention the actual mechanism at hand; pixel shift is relatively trivial to implement on the GH6 because it has in-body image stabilization—the camera's already capable of very precisely shaking the sensor around, so it's just a matter of writing firmware that sends extra commands to the stabilizer system in sync with a series of captures.