The “best” TV you could buy in 2005, television shows specifically appeared to be “high quality” or “clear” and now if you watch a show that is directly uploaded from the producers (circumventing continuous compression from file transfers) you can tell it’s out dated just based on the quality of the show (aside from cultural cues such as fashion, vehicles etc)
tl’dr : I was watching T.C.A.P w/ Chris Hansen on TV when it was aired, watching it now I can tell how old it is based on the quality of the recording.
In: 878
I’ll try an actual ELI5 answer:
Modern recordings are made with more pixels because we have better cameras and storage now.
Older recordings were made on film, and light has lots and lots of effective pixels because it doesn’t exactly use pixels in the first place.
In the late 90s through the aughts, TV producers started moving from film to digital but the technology didn’t make as many pixels then as it does now.
If the master recording has few pixels, it’s not easy to increase the number of pixels because the detail information is gone.
So there is an awkward period between high-resolution film and high-resolution digital where the recordings were low-resolution digital (by today’s standards) and because there is no film to re-scan with newer digital technology, there is no practical way to create a higher-resolution version.
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