> The 80s and 90s will forever be stuck in lousy low resolution.
You are off by few decades though. 35mm film photography and cinematography was still dominating until the end of 90s. Nikon D1 and Canon 1D were released in 1999 and 2001 respectively, and Star Wars EP2 in 2002 was notably first major movie recorded with digital cameras. Pleasantville (1998) and O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) were early examples of using digital intermediates.
Now those are interesting examples of digital cameras you provide above; definitely worth sharing and bringing to the table.
Now that I think of it, I think video recordings existed in the 70s too? Like how exactly were TV shows broadcast anyways now that I think about it. The Abba remastered stuff is where my association got set https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFrGuyw1V8s, that stuff is incredible.
> Now that I think of it, I think video recordings existed in the 70s too?
The cliff note's version is that the BBC perfected filming live TV. It worked because their analog version of deinterlacing 50 fields per second to 25 frames per second matched European film.
But, in the US, where TV ran at 60 fields per second, filming it at 30fps was just too short of an exposure time. So video was favored in the US.
A lot of pre-digital stuff was shot on film for various reasons. One reason is that 24/25fps film adapts very well to 50 fields per second or 60 frames per second; the consequence is a very minor speedup / slowdown. In contrast, it's a lot harder to adapt video between the two framerates with analog technologies.
Edit: I also suspect cost may have had something to do with it. I suspect that film was cheaper than video in the 1970s, but someone who was around at the time might understand the cost difference between video versus film.
I don't know if anyone "anticipated" HDTV in the 1970s, but back then artists did like putting their videos up on a big projected screen. At least in the 1990s, a lot of content, like Seinfeld and Friends, was done on film; both for the look, and so that it could be remastered for HDTV.
that would be deep if producers anticipated future remasterings and wanted to keep their options open for downstream derivatives that could bump royalties and revenue all along the way. That's some deep thinking if they actively rejected state of the art recording tech that precluded that sort of option.
It's not "deep" that producers at the time anticipated that re-runs would be broadcast on HDTV. In the 1990s, a lot of producers preferred the look of film over video; or even considered it a better overall medium.
You are off by few decades though. 35mm film photography and cinematography was still dominating until the end of 90s. Nikon D1 and Canon 1D were released in 1999 and 2001 respectively, and Star Wars EP2 in 2002 was notably first major movie recorded with digital cameras. Pleasantville (1998) and O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) were early examples of using digital intermediates.