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Comment by nelblu | Hacker News Reader

I still buy DVDs because I like classic movies and for those movies it doesn't matter whether you watch in dvd quality or Blu-ray. Plus DVD rips are significantly smaller in size and even though I have Blu-rays for some movies I don't have a Blu-ray player on my computer to rip them. So effectively my preference is to buy DVD, unless it's a relatively modern movie (post 90s)

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Not true. Movies were of course shot on film, which has way higher resolution than DVD.

Even old TV shows look better than ever, as long as they were scanned from film. Look at the original Star Trek or Twilight Zone on Blu-Ray.

You're talking about the most popular movies that were transfered to digital or even restored. Most films weren't. Plus, we lost immense amounts (most) of cinema that was produced before ~1950s when better film started being used.

> You're talking about the most popular movies that were transfered to digital or even restored. Most films weren't.

How are you watching a film on DVD if it hasn't been transferred to digital?

DVDs have been around for over twenty years. There are plenty of things that were released on DVD but now hang in license limbo due to a publisher going out of business or whatever. There may have been a transfer done for a DVD release that would need to be re-done for HD, and that all takes time, money, usually personal interest of some sort, and of course the physical items still have to exist (2008 Universal Studios vault fire, anyone?)

As far as I know lots of TV shows were not shot on film but rather on tape, which naturally limits quality to PAL/NTSC, since that's what gets recorded on tape. Similarly the archives of broadcasters are/used to be tape.

Why classical films look great at 2K/4K (21:39): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVpABCxiDaU

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