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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Older movies were filmed on actual film. Newer TV shows in the 80s and early 90s were filmed on VHS tape, which is far lower quality.
Because they were shot on film. Because a film image is not made up of pixels, there is no limit to the resolution you can convert it to digitally. Go look at films by Georges Méliès, one of the most influential filmmakers in the days of early cinema. His films can be found on YouTube in HD, sometimes in 4k, despite being shot almost 100 years ago, because his work was shot on film. When converting film to a digital format, the resolution of the film itself is not what determines how large of an image can be produced from the conversion. It has to do with the quality of digital camera or scanner being used to scan the film cells. If a 4k camera can scan a film cell, then an image can be converted from film to 4k digital video.
On top of a lot of good answers on here, remember that older movies tend to get a restoration treatment when they hit a big anniversary, rescanning the film, removing scratches and other artifacts.
It’s nostalgia. I love the way older movies looked versus how they look now. It’s to clear, to perfect.
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.
One thing to note is that the digital scans made today are literally cleaner than the originals. I remember when you could tell the difference between film and video tape on TV by the hairs and dust that popped up in the image.
The new scans are literally pristine. They even take out the cigarette burns that were used by projectionists to mark where the reels needed to be spliced.
Even in a theater there would be shit on the film that showed up. I saw some really old silent films that had been rescanned and they were just amazing. Literally better than when first shown. Kind of amazing.
Off topic, but in astrophysics…
The best satellites still use B&W because they can have higher resolution mono color than if they literally replaced two out of three mono color pixel sensors with the red and green color sensors. The fact is if you are measuring blue in that pixel you aren’t measuring red and green. so you are loosing information / resolution.
Newer satellites take three pictures with three color filters all with the same mono color pixel sensors…and use software to stitch the images across time.
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