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shotsallover t1_iujfssr wrote

A lot of it depends on how they were stored. If they were stored on a high quality master or digitally odds are the original content had more colors than the old TVs could even show you.

Old NTSC TV had a relatively narrow range of colors (color space) it could support. When we switched to HD we got a much wider range of colors. 4K has an even wider one. Many old TVs shows were stored with a wider color space than old NTSC TVs could display, so when you saw them on your old NTSC TV, it "clipped" the colors to what the TV could show. Which could have lead to them looking washed out.

Many old TV shows have been remastered for the streaming age, and now that we have TVs that can show us all the colors the show was originally created with, we get to see them. Some shows have even had the colors "corrected" to make them look more realistic/vibrant on modern TVs.

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shotsallover t1_iujj52h wrote

Also, many shows were re-scanned from the original source files to prepare them for streaming. Particularly popular ones. Many shows were shot on actual film (especially animated ones, though "shot" is a term used loosely) which has much better color than what NTSC could display. So when they went back they took some effort to scan them "better" for modern TVs.

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