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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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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Originally, they were filmed in a bit of a janky way, particularly if they were live shows – they would be broadcast directly, and then for recording they would have a recording camera pointed at a screen tuned into the broadcast. This happened until about the 1970s. For recorded content, it was produced on film, which doesn’t have a “resolution” per se – it’s analog rather than digital, there aren’t any pixels. The sensitivity of different film can produce differing results. Film sees much like your eye does; it doesn’t break things up into squares. Essentially, it’s a semi lossless format, if that makes sense, so decades later when we digitize it, our digital readers that are *miles* better than the first digital video cameras are able to capture much more of the image from the film than the video cameras of the ‘80s and 90s were capable of capturing from real life.

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