Digital pics, of course, can always be cleaned up electronically, so any digital with optical and electronic zoom capabilities would be infinitely better than just the spotting scope.
There's a practical limit to how well digital stills can be "cleaned up," and it's way below what CSI shows. Digital video of a relatively stationary or slow moving object (or multiple stills, but hundreds of frames work best) can be frame-stacked to get a pretty good image, though. Something like Registax can even be used to track a moving, non-changing object (think car moving, maintaining a constant angle to the camera and thus a constant appearance - a person walking almost always changes appearance too much for this process) for several frames.
This is what I've used a few times on security camera videos to clean up otherwise marginal images into something more useful. For example, the shot below was several seconds of 15fps video stacked to get a relatively low-noise image of the car, and take advantage of intermittent lighting.
