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
It sounds like a lot of people who never saw a show on a CRT television are throwing out their “facts”.
As long as you had a good signal, the picture was fine. Sure, not HD, but sure not the crap that it looks like on an LCD today either.
One major advantage to broadcast tv and CRT monitors is their near infinite number of colors, much as analog music has a near infinite number of sounds.
Reminds me of visiting my childhood home. When I was young, I thought it was a large house but going back there made me realize just how small it was. When you watch shows on what is a new TV at the time you can only compare it to what you’re accustomed to. Then when you update again you have the same comparison. My house when I was a kid was a three bedroom one bath ranch style house. I now live in a three bedroom 2 1/2 bath two story house that dwarfs my childhood home.
videos made for tube type tvs look better on those tvs because that’s what they were made for
There are many reasons for this.
First, most people’s expectations of TV quality have shifted considerably as sets have improved. Even if you had the best quality set in 2005 (I did) it would look like garbage compared to a cheap Walmart special today.
Second, the quality in which something would have been recorded would be much lower in 2005, even if using state of the art equipment, vs today. It isn’t just pixels (but pixels are important) it is also stuff like gamut (range of colours) and dynamic range (how wide a range of brightness those are recorded in). Think of 16 bit vs 32 bit colour, for example. A lot of stuff was recorded on film and to get it on TV you needed to scan that film. You aren’t going to re-scan 2003 content using 2023 technology because it isn’t worth it.
Finally, some modern sets are not as good at “upscaling” lower quality content. As a result, a set with better resolution without good upscaling will make lower quality content actually look worse.
Short answer: “Best TV” is relative to the time period. AT THE TIME the quality was “the best” because it was better than what we had previously. As we moved from 2005 to 2023, technology improved, and thus, changing our expectations for what “the best tv” looks like.
Not sure what you mean? I’ve been watching older HBO series (Sopranos, Entourage) that are 20+ years old and they all look fine.
Because they DID look better back then.
Check out this thread. It’s in reference to video games, but the point still stands.
Left side is what it looked like on a CRT TV, no wonder graphics as a kid looked like FIREE
byu/babbowski inFinalFantasyVII
Media meant to be watched on a CRT looks terrible on a digital TV. They DEPENDED on the fuzzyness of those “pixels” when they made the media.
>circumventing continuous compression from file transfers
Eh??
We didn’t know better. Look at an actual TV from 2005. 1080p was a massive improvement from 480i, but display technology has improved significantly since then — especially at the low end.
American TV from the early HD era looked and sounded different from what you’d see in film. The sound often had no dynamic range, just LOUD to compete with commercials. The visuals had to be kept to the center of the screen to be easily cropped for 4:3 broadcast. The lighting tends to be very bright, so the subject will be visible on a cheap LCD or fuzzy CRT screen.
There are a few people saying that the analog to digital conversion is what ruins those shows, but they’re dead wrong. If TV shows from that era were shot on video, which many were, there’s no film print to re-scan.
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