Why old Black & White films and TV seem to have better picture resolution than stuff filmed in the 80s and 90s?
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Because they were filmed with…well…film. Actual photographic movie film has an excellent resolution even when converted to digital formats. The reason why a lot of the 80’s and 90’s shows have a lower quality is because they were using the relatively new video tape technology which reduced the resolution and did not have a long shelf life if improperly stored.
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Television shows were originally filmed on film which had higher resolution than TV at the time, but was the ony way to capture video. Then in the 80s and 90s many TV shows switched to being recorded on video cassette which has much lower resolution (good enough for TV broadcasts at the time), but costs a ton less. That cost savings was significant, but it means there are no saved copies with better resolution than the original recordings.
Most black and white stuff was recorded on photographic film, which doesn’t have a fixed resolution (there are practical limits, but they are quite high). It’s just a series of pictures on film. You can scan it at high resolutions.
By the time of the 80s and 90s, most TV (though not film) was recorded on videotape. The thing about tape is that it doesn’t store pictures: instead it stores the waveforms of the radio signals you’d use to transmit the video and audio. This is much cheaper to produce, but in order to get the picture into a radio signal you have to quantize it. Most TV stuff was recorded in 480i (or 576i in PAL regions) at most.
You also have to consider that this stuff looks much worse on modern sets than it did on CRTs. There are several reasons for this, but a lot of it comes down to resolution mismatch: 480i and 576i don’t scale evenly to HD resolutions, and that introduces blur (especially on fhe crappy deinterlacing/upscaling hardware built into modern sets). People in the 80s and 90s didn’t settle for the blurry crap that it looks like today: it wasn’t HD, but it didn’t look bad.
Because (some of) the stuff in the 80s and 90s wasn’t actually filmed. It was taped. There’s a difference. (Counterexample, StarTrek TNG was filmed, and so you can watch it in near 4K)
Film is the analogue process of using tiny silver crystals to make images, and then showing you those images one after the other. The limiting factor in film is the physical size of silver crystals. (And they are very small)
Tape is more complicated than that, but it uses a magnetic strip and magnetizes it according to the image that is captured by the camera. That magnetization was only so granular, and so, you ended up with a maximum picture quality based on the standard at the time, or “standard definition”. Which worked when you only had 480p displays, but looks extra bad now.
There’s a similar thing with photography. My work involves me reviewing historical aerial photographs, and you start with like crystal clear photos in the 1950’s through the 1970’s, and then the 80s are insanely blurry, don’t get good resolutions again until like like past the 2010’s, due to the shift from like, actual aerial photography versus beginning to implement digital satellite imagery, which needed to be refined and improved for like thirty or forty years.
Shows recorded in 80’s used magnetic tape either as main recording medium or as “transport” medium. Some budget shows survived in achieves only in the form of magnetic tapes.
Used the U-matic format (3/4″ wide) that had poor horizontal resolution compared with film. Initially had 250 lines, improved later to 330 lines.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-matic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-matic)
In time that magnetic tape recordings lost even more of the qualities, and usually the color was the first to go, because of the way it was recorded (lower frequency carrier).
For comparation, the home versions of 1/2″ tape VHS had 240 lines and Betamax 250 lines of horizontal resolution.
PS: Movies were not regarded as museum pieces, so many didn’t get stored properly.
Interesting story about video mixes:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140727225102/https://www.mixonline.com/mag/audio_apocalypse_redux/](https://web.archive.org/web/20140727225102/https://www.mixonline.com/mag/audio_apocalypse_redux/)
Because at one time all they had were the same nice, expensive cameras used for movies. It wasn’t until later that cheaper cameras that were good enough for TV were invented and made it into the mainstream.
None of this is wrong, but some of the black and white movies you can see on You Tube, for example have been ‘restored’. They might look better than they did when new. OTOH the quality of things like George Reeves’ Superman or The Lone Ranger are still amazing to this day, albeing not restored.
On top of the film vs video tape argument, b&w tv also had better apparent resolution than colour because of Chroma Subsampling.
I’m going to use pixels to explain, although technically analog tv didn’t really use pixels, but it’s easier to visualise.
Pixels on the screen are measured in brightness (luma) and colour(chroma).
The problem is when you have hundreds of thousands or millions of pixels that requires a lot of information and analog tv didn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate.
To get around this they compress the colour information by using the same colour for a group of pixels instead of individually. They still have their brightness info so there will be different shades of the same colour.
The result works quite well, but it can make the colours and overall picture look muddied.
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