And video quality. Watching some historical videos from my childhood, like tv shows on youtube.... the quality is pure potato. Either the archiving is terrible, or we just accepted much worse quality back then.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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People always said that Betamax was better quality than VHS. What never gets mentioned is that regular consumer TVs at the time weren't capable of displaying the difference in quality. To the average person they were the same.
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You kinda can tell though. CRTs didn’t really use pixels, so it’s not like watching on today’s video equipment though
CRT screens definitely used pixels, but they updated on the horizontal line rather than per pixel. This is why earlier flatscreen LCDs were worse than CRTs in a lot of ways as they had much more motion blur as stuff like "sample and hold" meant that each pixel wasn't updated every frame if the colour info didn't change. CRTs gave you a fresh image each frame regardless.
I have heard that pixels in CRTs are round and LCD/LED are square, that’s the reason why aliasing is not too noticeable on CRTs. Is this true or another internet bs?
They're not round persay, but they aren't as sharp so have more light bleed into one another giving a natural alaising effect. This is why some old games where the art is designed to account for this bluring look wrong when played on pixel perfect modern TVs.
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There's a lot of archival video that is just terrible. Digital video compression issues have damaged a lot of old footage that's gotten shared over the years, especially YouTube's encoders. They will just straight up murder videos to save bandwidth. There's also a lot of stuff that just doesn't look great when it's being upscaled from magnetic media that's 240x320 at best.
However, there's also a lot of stuff that was bad to begin with and just took advantage of things like scanlines and dithering to make up for poor video quality. Take old games for example. There's a lot of developers who took advantage of CRT TVs to create shading, smoothing, and the illusion of a higher resolution that a console just wasn't capable of. There's a lot of contention in the retro gaming community over whether games looked better with scanlines or if they look better now without them.
Personally, I prefer them without. I like the crisp pixelly edges, but I was also lucky enough to play most of my games on a high quality monitor instead of a TV back then. Then emulators, upscaling, and pixel smoothing became a thing...
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It was filmed with poor quality and the films can degrade overtime. It was archived that way because the source was 💩
pure potato
Lol
I watch a lot of hockey. Just watching hockey games from the 2000s are full on potato. I don't remember them looking that bad back then.
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I do by audio quality. We currently live in the age of badly understandable dialogues.
I noticed when watching Good Omens on Amazon Prime that they offer a language option "Original + Dialogue Boost".
It works wonders. Almost feels like back in the days again when TV shows wanted dialogue to be understood.
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This is actually because our microphones became better
Sure, microphones got better but there is more too it. One huge factor is the mixing for cinemas and not for home theaters or worse for TV speaker.
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This video was exactly what first came to mind when I read "badly understandable dialogues"! It bothers me that as we got better mics, the actors became more unintelligible instead of the other way as one would predict.
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I think most people have given up and use subtitles on all the time.
Does anyone actually randomly send you nude girls? Genuinely curious
No. Doesn't look like it.
It's just as well. Where would you even put them all?
I hear this all the time, and maybe I just don’t watch THAT many shows/movies, but I haven’t come across anything where the actors sound like they’re mumbling. Do you have a few examples I could look up?
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... or how blurry the image is (SD vs HD).
You mean 4k vs HD, right?
Radio vs TV for Boomers
B&W vs Color for Gen X
SD vs HD would be Millenials
4K vs HD for Zoomers
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That's a big problem for stuff that was originally shot on video. Old stuff shot on film can look pretty good when digitized.
But then you also have that very specific window of time when a lot of stuff especially SFX was done on video that can't be upscaled. Babylon 5 fans weep.
Even early 16:9 stuff looks pretty dated now if it hasn't been remastered to 1080/4k.
Laughs in Australian 576i free-to-air TV
When I was a kid I used to think black and white meant the TV show or whatever used to be in color but since it got old it turned black and white. My thought process was they changed color just like old people's hair turns grey... This was 35 years ago before internet.
Re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my kids in new hi-def, and you can clearly and easily see the stunt doubles now, and the SFX look really dated now that you can see them clearly.
It's amazing what old CRTs would let you get away with.
It's not so much what they got away with but working with the tools they had. It is the same for pixel art in the early gen consoles.
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I was a private tutor about few years ago teaching 16 year old. I was 22.
I still can't forget his face looking at me like a living fossil talking about how crazyit was to have a touch screen phone the first time...
That's such a trip. Only a 6 year difference between the two of you, yet you experienced the dawn of something and they didn't, and it shapes both of your perspectives so much.
Even though it technically applies to transistors, Moore's Law has been a good barometer for the increase of complexity and capabilities of technology in general. And now because of your comment I'm kinda thinking that since the applicability of that law seems to be nearing its end, it's either tech will stagnate in the next decade (possible, but I think unlikely), or we may be due for another leapfrog into a higher level of sophistication (more likely).
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Lotta old shows are re-formated just to have the wider screen, since they would still film at higher res for movies or just because. It's not just an indication of age if something is still only in 4:3, it's an indication of thrift or just a general lack of giving a shit about the future.
a lot of old disney animated shows are now widescreen. Seinfeld is also widescreen and HD, probably was on film.
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Also the quality of the show go watch old Thomas the Tank Engine and compare it to the new one
It's not so back and white anymore, is it
Asteroid City switched between aspect ratios as well as switching between black&white as they swapped between the TV story and the 'real'/cinema story.
would you recommend the film? it's been quite under discussed for a Wes Anderson film..
Even for fans of his films, you have to be prepared for the weirdness to be dialled up to 11 in this one. It's the cinema equivalent of "I'm so meta, even this acronym".
Any of his others would be an easier and maybe more satisfying watch. It's a nice enough story of course, with the usual silly and neurotic characters and bizarre beautiful sets - just don't be surprised when people come out of the cinema looking confused.
Can always tell when a show is 4:3 aspect. Recently I've noticed some modern TV shows adopting the theater aspects of flat (1.85:1) or scope (2.4:1) which I think is pretty cool. The last episode of Strange New Worlds I watched was in scope, that's some high end filming.
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I have a relative who says their children won't watch 2D animated features because they are old