If these are the early digital cameras, the resolution was barely 720p. While technically hi-def, they left a lot to be desired that was quickly filled in with the ever expanding pixel counts
MiniDV was 480p, not even HD.
I cant put my finger on but miniDV movie are awefully hard to watch. I can easily watch a b&w movie from 1929, one shot with Panavision or Imax, this particular cam is something else. Maybe it's just me?
If these are the early digital cameras, the resolution was barely 720p. While technically hi-def, they left a lot to be desired that was quickly filled in with the ever expanding pixel counts
MiniDV was 480p, not even HD.
The format is inherrently quite low resolution. 480p at best. Also minidv cameras were inexpensive in general and therefore didn't have the image quality that more expensive hardware would.
Are you really asking why the home video recording from the 90s is less watchable than something like a professional movie meant to be seen at a movie theater? It’s not a professional formate. It is like comparing a Polaroid to a film camera from the 70. It’s meant for quick accessible amateur video.
A black and white film from 1929 was as the name suggests, recorded on film. Because of how film is captured the "resolution" of a piece of film is sort of limitless. If you've got a small bright source of light you can sort of see this with shadows of, say, your hand. when you move the light closer to your hand the shadow gets bigger, but it stays well defined, film sort of works like that when it's projected. when it's digitised (transferred from film to a digital video format, like a scanner on a printer does) , it will be whatever the resolution the digitiser is set to/capable of. Those MiniDV videos are recorded digitally to begin with so can only ever be as good as the digital camera making the recording, those early digital cameras were very low resolution and had poor bitrate, as well as other things like being bad at maintaining a good light level. this all works together to make the video quality bad, but unlike film, however it was recorded, it stays that way forever, as there is no more data that can be extracted to improve the video quality, unlike film where it can just be digitised again at a higher resolution or with better colour or whatever as the technology of the digitisers improves.
Older movies were shot on film, which doesn't really have a fixed resolution in the sense that we typically understand it. You can zoom in, or scan finer, until either the film grains become a problem or the wavelengths of visible light become a barrier. Movie film was made with the idea in mind that you would project the image onto gigantic screens, so they tend to be very good about grain. Videotape can't do this, nor can digital formats. In order to represent the video as numbers, you have to nail down a resolution. For MiniDV, that was 480p/576p. That was a major step up from VHS's 240p, and more than sufficient for the SD/proscan CRTs of the time, but it couldn't scale up to modern HDTVs.