Well, quite; it’s the historical filter in action. The ones we still care about are, almost by definition, some of the best.
To answer the OP: the same reason people would get very, very bored if they only watched movies that come out in IMAX today. Expensive process = few releases. Few releases = even fewer good releases. I can watch Transformers in IMAX, or Persepolis at a 15-foot local screening. Am I really going to go with Transformers? To the exclusion of all else? I think I’d go nuts. Image quality isn’t everything.
Another thing to note is that image quality on early colour prints wasn’t great; human vision responds much more to luminance than to chroma (i.e. brightness over colour). It’s quite noticeable that early colour movies were less clear than contemporary B&W ones, making the preference of colour over B&W far more subjective.
Consider this: you can only fit so many photo-receptors on a given sensor patch (be it film or digital). When you’ve got to separate red, green and blue, that means you’re reducing your spatial resolution to achieve colour reproduction. So for a given density of photo-receptors, the choice of colour over B&W is very much a tradeoff of colour versus resolution. Not an obvious choice, until resolution is so high you can chuck some of it away.
There’s another reason that it became almost universal to film movies in color somewhere around the late 1960’s. Up to that time, the colors didn’t look quite right. They looked garish and exaggerated. Then considerably improved color film was available. So it became harder to argue that color films just didn’t look right, and black and white films went out of fashion quite quickly.
I do think that this is a matter of personal taste more than anything. I’m sure the people of the time “put up with it” because they were used to it.
That being said, personally I find it difficult to enjoy B&W movies on the whole. Everyone looks unhealthy, the sky is always overcast, all the buildings are grey or white. It works well for WWII; gives everything a nice apocalyptic feel. But for most films I just find it depressing, or at least offputting.
I’m reminded of a neat detail in a sci-fi novel whose name I don’t recall; the protagonist at one point thinks back to watching The Wizard of Oz, and how it starts out two dimensional in Kansas, and expands to a “normal” hologram when Dorothy ends up in Oz.
I am, among other things, a photographer, and I do a lot of work in Photoshop. Occasionally I have to convert a color image to grayscale. It’s a complicated procedure involving many manipulations, and even then it’s only an approximation of a b&w photo.
The real challenge is leaving some objects in color while the background is grayscale, and making it almost look like the subject really is that way.
And by the way . . . almost all of my favorite movies are in b&w, and I will not watch colorized versions of them.
I think it comes down to much was done in B&W because the televisions of the that time were B&W and most people had only one in in the house. It comes down to the cost of implementing the technology across the whole process from making to viewing.
Were movies back then often shown on television? I’m not being snarky, I really don’t know. But I think it’d be a mistake to assume they used the same theater → TV distribution model we use today.
ETA: After all, the image shape wasn’t made to the aspect ratio of television. Hence the evil that is Pan & Scan.
I think we are overlooking the basic question that was posed: If a newer, “better” technology had appeared, why did people back then not insist it be applied in every context possible as soon as possible?
I think the answer to that question is more interesting than arguing about which is “better”, Black-and-white or color?
Perhaps the OP doesn’t realize that back then, change moved at a slower pace. People didn’t throw away their things as soon as something newer and shinier appeared. There wasn’t the disposable income back then. The world had just gone through years of Depression, war, and rebuilding…people were used to doing without and making do. And people appreciated that some things that were expensive should be reserved as special treats, not everyday fare. When movies were being produced at a seemingly breakneck pace…my mom said something about there being a new movie in the cinema every week or two, and it was a ritual to go see every movie…and there was only one screen, so you didn’t get as much choice…with a pace like that, and people’s ability to accept that some things were too expensive yet to be used all the time, you can see how people would be content to let the new technology come in slower. Theaters in small towns couldn’t necessarily afford to switch to new projectors…if that was an issue. I may be talking out of my hat on that one!
And people weren’t so demanding about change back then. It’s only now, when technology and manufacturing can make things available almost overnight, that we feel we have to toss out the old as soon as the new arrives. back then, you saved up to buy a color TV…you didn’t throw it on your credit card. And the new models weren’t obsolete within months, so you didn’t feel that incessant urgency to change, Change, CHANGE!
That’s the point, though; the B&W to colour television transition requires consumers to go out and buy really expensive new kit. The same transition in movies requires only that they buy their next ticket for a colour movie.
Consumers drive things, pretty much full stop. The barrier to getting colour TV was pretty high - you had to spend a whole bunch of cash on the latest model. The barrier to consumer entry into the colour movie market is very low, which is why it’s not an unreasonable question to ask why the adoption was relatively slow.
Bingo. The Jazz Singer was a sensation (It saved Warner Brothers from bankruptcy). People wanted to see sound films, so the studio provided it.
There was no similar rush to view color films.
Movies were on TV from almost the beginning, though the films were generally cheap B-pictures from second-rate studios. Westerns were very popular (note the trope that whenever someone turned on the TV on a TV show or movie, they’d see a western), probably because Monogram and Republic Studios were strapped for cash so were willing to sell their libraries. The major studios refused to sell films to their competitors and made all their money from theater receipts.
NBC Saturday Night at the Movies, premiering in 1961, was the first series to regularly show recent American theatrical films. Other networks joined in and NBC added other movie nights, so it became routine for movies to show up on the networks after they left the theater. When cable came in, HBO started getting the films.
Well, movies prior to 1950 were in the same 4:3 aspect ratio as TV; that’s one reason why that fomat was chosen for TV. Once the studios saw TV as a competitor, they went into widescreen in order to offer something you couldn’t see in TV, up to and including Cinerama. But older films don’t require pan and scan.
In The Old Days, most movies seen on TV were very, very old ones shown at odd hours. And most old movies were not only in B&W–they were shot in an aspect ratio that fit the TV screen neatly.
Wide screens & increased use of color were studio tactics to convince people to turn off their TV’s & return to the theaters. We all know how well that worked.
I’m old enough to remember B&W TV; I have no problem with B&W movies.
ETA: What RealityChuck said. One of the first NBC big movies I remember was Norma Shearer’s Marie Antoinette. An oldie, even then, but a biggie!
I suspect that the absence of sound was seen as a much bigger issue than the absence of colour. They did various things to get round the absence of sound, including dialogue given in written form, and live music played to accompany the movie, but it was pretty clear that sound is a very important part of drama.
I envisage some OP on the SDMB 50 years down the line (of course the Dope will still be here!) posting,
“I tend to negatively prejudge movies that are on a 2d screen, especially from the era where 3D Total Immersion Surroundorama was available.”
Great movies are great movies, whatever their format. And I can only assume that the OP has never watched any of the great film noir classics. He’d realize then just how a great director can use black and white and a thousand shades of grey to stunning effect.
I’ll throw in some more modern ones: Pi, Dead Man, Ed Wood, Swoon. They look great in b/w and have a tone and mood to them that wouldn’t work too well, or at all, in color.