I have wondered about this for some time... If you look at some of the movies filmed in the 1960's they are downright beautiful, with clarity and great color/light/exposure etc.
Then, suddenly, when you watch any typical 80's movie, it looks terrible by comparison--not sharp, dull colors, etc.
This seems to be true of live TV or video as well, because some of the shows from the 50's and 60's had that nice clear black and white "video-ish" look to them (something with the frame rate perhaps?), whereas the sitcoms from the 80's are blurry/grainy and just overall seem to be inferior in quality.
Has anyone else noticed this, or have an explanation?
Up until the 1960s, almost everything was captured on film. Film is a photosensitive material that retains an image when exposed to light.
The larger the size of the film, the better quality the image captured will be(these are little grains, essentially like resolution).
Most movies and TV shows were shot on 35mm film, which is comparable in image resolution to a 4k camera today (about 4000 pixels across, or 8 megapixels).
The problem with this was that film can only be used once, as once it is exposed and developed, it retains that image forever. This of course is very expensive.
Around the early 1950s was when the first shows began to be taped on video. Video, instead of physically storing the images on a strip of film, records images into a series of magnetic signals on a reel of tape. Unlike film, where you can actually see each frame when looking at the strip, video tapes look essentially black.
Video technology, although offering much less resolution (a few hundred lines at most, about the same as a .2 megapixel camera), was much more economical. You can record over a magnetic tape dozens, even hundreds of times before it wears out.
Because TV at the time were only capable of displaying a few hundred lines (eventually to be 625 lines when PAL was introduced in the '60s), the benefit of the high quality of film was unable to be seen very well. And since shows were not sold after they aired in box sets, there was no point in using a format that retained images.
This was so economically beneficial that over the next few decades, more and more shows and things generally made for just television were shot on video. Afterward they aired, the tapes would be wiped and the next episode would be recorded over it. This caused us to lose a lot of content from this era, like the lost Doctor Who episodes.
The improvement that you saw in the '90s to today has been a combination of improving video quality (thanks to digital) and some shows again being shot on film (the Sopranos, Walking Dead).
HDTVs, that are capable of showing film's glory, have also lead to the resurgence of film, although in the past 5 years, digital cameras have reached/surpassed film cameras in quality.
In addition to the fantastic and clearly well-researched answer provided by /u/meal_in_a_glass, I would also like to add that some of the difference might come from lighting and other effects that aren't directly related to the film. Most of the shows and movies from the 60s were well-lit whereas many of the shows and movies from the 80s are dark as a stylistic element. The darkness make the colors less apparent.That might account for part of the difference.