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

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