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?

Question

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?

In: 1

Answer 1

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.