Why do older animated shows from the 80s/90s look darker in color than shows today?

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Why do older animated shows from the 80s/90s look darker in color than shows today?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

A lot of it depends on how they were stored. If they were stored on a high quality master or digitally odds are the original content had more colors than the old TVs could even show you.

Old NTSC TV had a relatively narrow range of colors (color space) it could support. When we switched to HD we got a much wider range of colors. 4K has an even wider one. Many old TVs shows were stored with a wider color space than old NTSC TVs could display, so when you saw them on your old NTSC TV, it “clipped” the colors to what the TV could show. Which could have lead to them looking washed out.

Many old TV shows have been remastered for the streaming age, and now that we have TVs that can show us all the colors the show was originally created with, we get to see them. Some shows have even had the colors “corrected” to make them look more realistic/vibrant on modern TVs.

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