Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do Older DVDs Look So Bad?
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Original masters being lost? Plausible enough. Other masters being lost too? Less plausible, but still within the realms of possibility. Those and every existing NTSC DVD getting lost or destroyed, leaving only PAL DVDs? So unlikely as to not be worth considering. |
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P13D5
Posts: 2 |
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The article over simplifies the reason, and the causes can be:
1.Production quality of the disk, as is pointed the oldest released tend to be analog transfers but also some old disk are compressed using a subpar compressor and/or bad compressor configuration, there is also the problem of compression to low bit rates to try to cramp the biggest number of episodes per disk and this result in more artifacts. -> Solution: Buying a better mastered version. 2.How is upscalled, most HD-TVs have poor scaling. -> Solution: an upscaling player, a PC can be a solution but is more complex to setup correctly. 3.Over-processing, lot of HD-TVs do post-processing to enhance the image but sometimes this have the opposite effect. -> Solution: disable the post-processing, normally the game mode of the TVs do this. 4.The display quality, low contrast tend to exaggerate the artifacts making look it worse and most LCD HD-TVs don't have the same contrast ratio that as an old CRT an for that the artifacts tend to be more apparent (actually there are some HD CRT TVs). -> solution: buy a TV with better display or alternatively a DLP or Laser projector. I have seen this when a friend brought a new TV, the DVDs looked worse than in his old TV. I recommended him to buy a BD player with a good upscaling to substitute his on DVD player, this had positive effect in the quality but this only enhance the quality a little, then I make him activate the game mode when playing disk and then the disk looked a lot better. But even after all of this the DVDs look worse than using his BD player and my DLP projector, also if I use the DLP projector and my PC the DVDs even look better. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Well, what you've given us is a how-to guide, which is great, but the purpose of the Answerman column is to provide basic info, so that readers can get an idea of what's going on and that there is usually a logical reason behind seemingly illogical things. A lot of the solutions seem to be "Buy a new ____," though, and I don't feel entirely comfortable about how casually that's thrown out. But maybe that's just me and finding simply buying new equipment on a whim to be reckless spending of money. To a videophile, I'm sure it's just another day, but to someone like me, for whom buying a new TV is rare and I consider TVs expensive, it doesn't feel right for me to read something in a tone that makes it sound like buying a new one is as common as buying new clothes or buying groceries. |
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P13D5
Posts: 2 |
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leafy sea dragon you are right, my intention was not a how-to guide but had trow solutions to lightly. I wanted to point that the article ignored altogether that the playing setup/hardware also affects the quality.
And I also find that buying new equipment on a whim to be reckless spending of money, and I'm sure that buying a new TV for me is even rarer that for you, the newer one in my house is at least 15 years old, the only exception is the projector that is only one year old and that was brought to be able to view the BDs in Full HD. Also most people don't evaluate the TVs when buying a new one, and their selection is basically drove by it size and prize, making quite often they to bitch that their DVDs look worse than before as the cheap ones tend to have poor contrast. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2025 |
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It does look like something that had been ripped right from an old analog source. There's also a lot of rainbowing, dull colors, and the opening credit sequence still has hard English captions beneath the kanji, and various signs are translated with hard subs. It reminds me of Viz/Pioneer's old Ranma discs. Interestingly, the Pretty Sammy OVA episodes on the same disc look much better, if still problematic. They're at least a lot more sharp and colorful. The Mihoshi Special was also skipped on Geneon's own Tenchi OVA box set, so it must be in a separate deal or something. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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While that is true, it's not really relevant to the question asked. The comparison isn't between DVD and Blu-ray, it's between old DVD and new DVDs. Same format, same equipment, same setup, difference in quality. Whatever alterations you make to the equipment and setup, the newer DVDs are going to look noticeably better than the older ones. The question is why the difference between old and new, not why DVD doesn't look better than it does. The only thing I think the article could have expanded on a bit more, which you also touch on a little bit, is that the encoding software was fairly primitive back then, so it couldn't produce as good results, and that people weren't as skilled at it, so optimal settings tended not to be used. But honestly, the nature of the masters affected the quality way more than the encoder did. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Ah, I see what you mean then. I think there is an implication in the question asked about DVDs being lower quality compared to newer ones when played on the same TV, however. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4570 |
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Heh, I'm actually rewatching those old DVDs right now, and I know the feeling. I generally don't pixel-analyze video, but in this case it's bad enough that I'd have to be blind to not notice it. I remember an old explanation/rumor going around that the US release was intentionally nerfed because Reasons, but who knows if it's actually true. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Actually I suspect streaming services like Netflix, On-Demand, etc., have a lot more to do with rhe slow adoption of Blu-ray. Why invest in a player and rental media when I can just watch a stream. People at ANN are way more concerned about video niceties than the vast majority of viewers who care mostly about content. |
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DangerMouse
Posts: 3982 |
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Good to see the Armitage fans! Yeah I'm glad I picked up the BD of Scrapped Princess too 
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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The adoption rate isn't the issue. Bluray actually had a faster adoption rate than DVD. The issue is that physical home media sales have been declining for a several years now. DVD really only had VHS as competition, and DiVX for a very short period. Bluray not only competes with DVD, but also digital streams, purchases, and rentals. |
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I_Drive_DSM
 Posts: 217 |
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This topic makes me forget how long DVD anime has actually been a thing; been spoiled by streaming.
The very first anime DVD I purchased was the Knights of Ramune compilation the turn of Y2K. At the time I thought it was great as it meant I didn't have to purchase $25 VHS tapes with only two episodes each. Having played it recently on a modern TV it doesn't hold up very well at all. Understandably there is very questionable compression going on to get the episodes to fit on the disk, and not only are massive artifacts present but everything is exceptionally washed out. No amount of adjusting settings helped. From a personal stand-point it doesn't necessarily bother me as having grown up on anime in the 80s and 90s on mostly VHS I understand visual limitations. The short-comings did not make it completely unwatchable, and older anime as a whole is for me not unwatchable. However from an archival stand-point where more and more classic series are possibly "lost" due to deterioration of original analog media or improper transfers it's particularly concerning. Especially concerning if say a title was transferred to DVD during this early time period and say had a license "lost" or dropped. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Unfortunately, studios are still stuck in 2008 mode of thinking that TOO, and starved Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime out of all their 20th-century movies. If you were one of those folks back in 2010 who threw out their disk catalog because "Netflix has it all now"...suc-kerrr! 
Studios at the moment are also starving the subscription services because they (still) think that Netflix is "competition" to their vested interests of seeing Digital Ownership "take over" and "replace" Blu-ray--which, if you talk to any of your grownup friends, isn't likely happening any time soon. And some home-theater fans are now discovering a "disc Renaissance" of going to their public library for the classics and past recents, now that Netflix got out of the disk-by-mail business and Blockbuster has been wiped off the face of the earth. Now, the problem is just in getting studio execs unstuck in time, and letting them find out that Blu-ray didn't turn out to be just a "fad". Last edited by EricJ2 on Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:15 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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Oddly enough, some have claimed that not only do old (defined as pre-2006) DVDs look bad, that they won't even work anymore. Perhaps non-collectors believe that retail DVDs have similar shelf lives as consumer-grade burnable DVD+/-R discs or something, which is definitely not the case. So I put in the 2000 DVD release of Generator Gawl, and lo and behold, the discs still worked fine. Didn't look that great on an HDTV of course, but then again, it never looked that great to begin with.
Many digital fansubs in the early 00s actually did use yellow subs; it wasn't until the advent of BitTorrent and greater competitiveness in the scene in 2003-04 that the rainbow of subtitle colors became commonplace. And even today, the occasional fansub that uses yellow doesn't get that much hate, not compared to the hate that disc or stream rips with yellow get. The anti-industry crowd really gave the game away when rips of Funimation streams became prevalent in the download scene and on bootleg streaming sites. (Prior to that time, you would've had to watch Funi discs or rips that used Funi's DVD subs as-is to see that style.) Suddenly Funimation's unassuming white-with-black-outlines subs became "horrendous," "ugly," "eyecancer," etc. Clearly, the absolute worst fonts and colors are whichever ones official releases happen to use. Same thing happened with the font Trebuchet MS: perfectly acceptable when used in mid-00s fansubs, but became "terrible styling" after CR started using it. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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If I may enquire, are you suggesting that burnable DVD+/-R media has a notably short life expectancy when compared to other media? My backups (of assorted content that I cannot actually remember) would be imperilled if so! |
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