I have some DVDs of shows/movies from early 2000s and the quality is awful. I also notice it on some streaming platforms. Was it always this bad?
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Your tv might be modern, but the tv shows have been recorded with old cameras.
They didn’t have the technology yet to record it in a high resolution which is why they can only show the resolution on your modern tv that the cameras recorded back then.
Because modern tvs always try to upscale and redefine the video. Old video was formatted for standard definition tvs, so it will look bad on high definition ones. Also a lot of the video has been converted from analog to digital, again this effects the quality.
So interesting thing about that.
Really old TV shows have the potential to look amazing because they were shot on film that’s as high quality as movies today. Film is roughly equal to 6–8k resolution.
But sometimes around the 70s-80s (I think, I don’t remember the exact dates) a lot of TV shows started shooting on video tape. Not sure if you are old enough to remember VHS tapes but they were basically shooting on those (but a bit higher quality) but those look like crap but it was both a lot cheaper and a lot easier to edit.
It wasn’t until early 2010s where shows largely transitioned *back* to not looking like shit.
In addition to the other answers here, your TV in the early 2000’s was much smaller. Your typical 50”+ TV of today just amplifies the low resolution
In addition to the other answers, I’d like to add that colour bleeding was probably a huge factor in these shows looking better on old TVs compared to new one. It’s the same reason why a lot of retro games look bad now, because the way they were designed was for monitors where one pixel would bleed into another, instead of showing as a crisp square.
[Here’s an example of such sprites where modern monitors just don’t do them justice.](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JmOsq.png)
You didn’t notice it was so bad originally because the analogue TV standard was designed to be viewed at 7 screen heights. Full HD (2K) is designed to be viewed at 3 screen heights. These days a 40″ screen is smallish but, in the days of CRT sets, that was ludicrously large and almost never seen. Most cinema projectors are still only 2K.
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