Nostalgia of old tv sets

Ah, the rose-colored glasses effect that also makes "tube amps sound better."

 

Given how it is mastered for 480i, it looks pretty crummy upconverted, especially being interlaced. With CRT the flaws are less apparent and doesn't feel as video-like. I really do look forward to seeing DS9 remastered for HD. It's the most interesting looking of all the spin-offs with the unique sets, lighting and composition.

 

As Makeshift said, it's more than simple nostalgia. Older shows weren't made to be seen in such crisp, clear resolution. The flaws are more noticeable.

Have you ever seen pictures of some of the props and starship models? Up close to the real human eye these props can look cheap and fake and sometimes even sloppy, yet they look good on screen.

Sometimes these things weren't made to be viewed at the highest resolution.

 

Many live TV shows had to rebuild their sets when HDTV arrived because of this. However, it has nothing to do with watching old signals on a new TV.

If the show was shot on film, and that film is remastered in the new medium, then the finer details and flaws captured on film will stand out. But if a Standard Definition (NTSC/PAL/SECAM) signal is run on an HDTV (with upscaling), the only artifacts that will stand out are those of the signal—like watching a heavily compressed video intended for mobile Web devices on an HDTV.

That's what I meant by "rose colored glasses." Sometimes artists depended on the lack of fidelity in an old medium (like standard def analog TV) to hide details that should not be seen (like the wires that flew the Eagles in SPACE: 1999).

 

Yeah, you have the right idea there. I have no trouble watching TOS or TNG in HD as they are remastered and look great, but other shows produced on 480i resolution video tape (or at least still stuck in that realm) don't really look flattering when upscaled. At least with TOS on DVD it was 480p from a film master.

 

We may be thinking of two different things with the term "live TV". In the 1950s, several television series were broadcast live (I'm old enough to have watched them). These days, it seems live TV is mostly limited to news broadcasts on the national and local levels. I know some local stations had to upgrade their news sets for high definition.

 

Nope. "Live TV" means you are watching events in realtime, save any minor delays incurred by broadcast technology.

The salient point I was making concerned the master format of a program. Shows produced in film can look better to today's audiences than originally broadcast, provided those source films are remastered to HDTV.

A show mastered in video, such as DOCTOR WHO, will never look any better than its first run. Upscaling it to HDTV will not bring out any more detail in the scene, and may actually enhance the artifacts of the old analog TV and recording systems.

As for those live shows of the early '50s, any recordings of them will unquestionably look far worse today than originally broadcast since they had to be recorded with kinescopes (film cameras shooting a video screen; the reverse of telecine). Practical VTRs did not exist before the mid-50s.

Anyone nostalgic for the Fisher Price PXL-2000, which used audio cassettes?

 

Okay, I'll agree with you on that point. As wonderful as Ernie Kovacs was with his videotape experiments, they've aged terribly.

 

There was a brief interval after the U.S. converted to digital television when I hadn't yet bought a modern TV set. I used a converter box to watch digital broadcasts on my old TV.

It was weird. The picture seemed small. The image was square within the curved edges of the CRT. So I don't think you'll get that old-time feeling from a digital broadcast. The thing to do is watch a Star Trek DVD on you parents' old TV. That would look about right.

 

Wow..the last person I ever expected to see mentioned in a Star Trek forum was Ernie Kovacs! He was funny as hell.

 

^ The Nairobi Trio skit was so good, Harry Nilsson did an homage to them.

 

This thread brings back many fond memories of rushing home from school to watch Ultraman, Marine Boy, Speed Racer, Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot, Kimba, Lost in Space, and the best of them all, Star Trek, in glorious black and white on our 13-inch set on Channels 5 and 20 in DC.

 

^^ OVer 25 years of color experience? In the mid '60s? That's stretching the truth somewhat out of shape.

 

Well it was definitely still in the lab, but RCA was working on color television in the early '40s:
http://www.earlytelevision.org/rca_dot_sequential.html

 

That advert in COLOR

 

Yep, took us twenty years, but we finally got there.

 

Yeah, there were tests by different scientists during the late 1920s, and RCA demonstrated a system in 1940. The main problem seemed to be finding a method of transmitting color images over the airwaves, which required a different method than monochrome transmission.

 

My favorite part is "Advanced circuitry that won't go haywire."