TV picture back in the day on tube TVs

[Bozley0621]

My husband and I watched season 1 of the Amazing Race a while ago. The picture was formatted for the screen of an old tv in standard def. The picture was so😱 awful.

Were all pictures on TVs this awful back in the day and we didn't know any better, or was this particular picture bad b/c it wasn't formatted for our modern wide screen, HD TV?

 

[seinman]

My husband and I watched season 1 of the Amazing Race a while ago. The picture was formatted for the screen of an old tv in standard def. The picture was so😱 awful.

Were all pictures on TVs this awful back in the day and we didn't know any better, or was this particular picture bad b/c it wasn't formatted for our modern wide screen, HD TV?

It really was that bad, but we didn't care for a few reasons.

1) We didn't know any better. Until HD came along, SD looked pretty good to us.

2) The native resolution of CRTs was low, so the picture did not be to be scaled. Since now you're watching SD content on an HD display, it is stretched, which makes it look even more blurry. If you took that same SD copy of Amazing Race and played it on an old SD CRT, it would look sharper.

 

[priitv8]

2) The native resolution of CRTs was low.... If you took that same SD copy of Amazing Race and played it on an old SD CRT, it would look sharper.

That's because the CRT screens were simply plain small (32" was absolute max for 4:3) compared to today's flat panels.

PS The worst possible SD material to watch on HDTV-s is the footage from very first video recorders. The 35mm film for example is even today good to produce BluRay HD disks.

 

[Mrbobb]

It somewhat depends on the quality of the recording regardless of format. I got a few Single Definition DVDs that look pretty darned good to me.