The film ‘Ice Station Zebra’ is on the TV and was made in 1968. The picture is as good (if not better) as any current production I see on e.g Netflix. How is it so sharp when it was way before the days of HD?
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Film has much higher effective resolution than Full HD. The reason old TV was lower quality is related to the ability to transfer enough data in a given time over radio waves. Technology has caught up, and now films can be digitized at their full quality.
It was shot in Cinemascope. That’s a 65mm film format with a 2.35 – 1 aspect ratio. That was the 4k of the day.
Because it was filmed on film. Film can get incredibly high quality detail because it doesn’t have pixels.
What made older TV shows have lower quality was the fact that the data had to be broadcast somehow, over the air or over cable. And that had much much lower data transfer rates than today. So the version that was broadcast had to be lower quality and less detailed than the original to be broadcast.
But if you take old film and re-scan it, you can get much higher resolution versions
Film doesn’t exactly have a pixel resolution, because it’s a large number of tiny crystals that react with light so there’s no “dots per inch”, but the 35 mm film commonly used in movie production has an image quality that approximates to about 5k digital.
For things short to be very high quality they used to use larger film, like 70mm, this has a resolution up to about equivalent to 18k ish.
This is why films shot before the 00’s can be digitized to a fairly high quality. There was then a period in the 00’s where films were shot digitally, but the cameras weren’t as high resolution as we have now, so there was a dip in film quality that can never be recovered over the period until the cameras improved to at least 35mm film equivalent.
Fun fact: Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes loved this movie an insane amount. There was a period of time where he lived in Vegas and bought a TV station, and while he’d occasionally settle for demanding they replay a regularly scheduled program that he’d missed, by and large he’d just demand they play Ice Station Zebra on repeat. To the point Vegas entertainers came to recognise this movie being played on that particular channel was the surest way to know if Howard was home.
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