I was looking at a re-run of MASH a few minutes ago and it struck me how low res and “rough” it looked compared to regular TV. I don’t recall it looking that crappy when it first aired decades ago. It was like an overused VHS tape.
Are the media copies degraded over time or is it just suffering by comparison with modern broadcast TV.
Here’s a snapshot of the show
I believe your expectations have gotten higher.
I guess it does depend on the network. When the cable channels around here air it, it looks like the DVD, which(I assume) have been remastered. They look perfect.
Keep in mind any SD show is going to look at least a little crappier on an HDTV than on a plain old TV from 15-20 years ago. I sometimes have the same channel running on an old 13" CRT and a 32" LCD and when it’s an SD channel it always looks great on the CRT and like crap on LCD. It’s not just that smaller sets make it look sharper, as I used to do this with a 27" CRT (which would actually be slightly bigger than the LCD for 4:3 shows) next to the 13" and it looked as good as the 13"
Now, some filmed shows (but not taped shows) from that era do look okay in HD if you watch on the station’s HD feed if they’ve gone back and made new HD versions from the source film. I once saw a Cheers rerun that looked so good that if it hadn’t been in 4:3 instead of 16:9 you never would’ve known it wasn’t made for HD to begin with. Yet not all stations have those better versions, another channel running Cheers looked just as bad as you say MASH did, no matter if watching on their HD or SD channel. (I think it was Hallmark Channel that had the good looking Cheers, if anyone wanted to know)
That looks like a first season ep, with Colonel Blake, so those are going to be the worst quality of them all no matter what.
I have seen some stations or networks aren’t running the remastered version of MASH, and it’s obvious. The originals do look like an old tape that’s been dragged through the mud, but the remastered version is clear and you can actually see colors other than just OD green.
Yes, this is the key to it. When originally broadcast filmed TV shows were projected into a kinescope (or telecine depending on who you ask) which is essentially a video camera pointed at a film screen. It’s a little more complex than that but that’s the basic idea. Once the show gets syndicated it gets distributed to affiliates directly on videotape (recorded from a telecine). Broadcast quality 2-inch videotape back in the day, but 2nd (or 3rd) generation videotape none the less. Any show that was shot on film (most anything pre-1970) can be remastered into high definition (for release on Blu-ray), but it has to be specifically re-done just for that and it isn’t cheap. Any show from the 70s or 80s that was shot directly on videotape (like* All in the Family, WKRP, Cosby, Roseanne* etc.) will not get a Blu-ray release because there’s no point. You can’t up-convert SD video to HD.
