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Comment by finnw | Hacker News Reader

> I'm amazed that people are amazed by photo quality from two decades ago

It's partly because the media (especially TV news) deliberately blurs and desaturates pictures to indicate what decade they are from. Which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the film technology of the time. But it is easy to forget that they are doing this and assume that the original photos are really like this. Why would 70s and 80s photos be desaturated more than 60s photos for example.

Even for digital media (e.g. youtube) tools like this are popular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChY8IIc_fv4

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Are they doing this with tv shows and movies? Sometimes I am amazed to see how blurry some programs from the 80's seem. Even some movies that were shot in 35mm seem blurry. It must be the copy that they have at that tv and not the original roll. If not Idon't know what's happening here. Movies from the 40's seem to have better resolution than more modern ones.

Many shows were shot on 35mm film and then telecined to tape for editing and FX. Updating it to HD would mean going back to the camera negatives, figuring out which portions were used in which cuts, scanning it, re-conforming all the cuts and then re-doing all the FX.

This was done recently for the first few season of Star Trek: TNG and the difference is amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZQetJVRu0I

Many TV shows are done from tape masters instead of the 35mm because of the cost of transferring them or that the originals were lost. The tapes vary in quality but a popular format (type-c 1 inch) used from the late 70s to late 90s is similar to DVD. Movies are always stored on 35mm which can be better than a blu-ray if scanned properly.

Many TV shows from the 80s and 90s were mastered on analog tape (U-Matic or Betacam) with variable quality (250 lines on U-Matic, 350 lines on Betacam SP) but very low by today standards.

Furthermore, these sources are often cropped/zoomed/stretched from 4:3 to 16:9, which lowers quality even more.

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