home viewers aren’t engineers. there will be a loss. at all steps. everywhere. expansion of the universe styles. even the top engineer within ranges will get maybe 90-99% and that’s at best case. now repeat that multiple times. it’s physics. when you re-record or retransmit something analog you lose. every time. in detail. in clarity, in absolute range. that’s a very long pipe from the cell to the analog tv set all steps included, and the art direction accounted for that.

and also, it’s way easier to instruct a girl in the paint department (how it was done then) to paint a solid color within the lines, from a specific color number, than to worry about how well they painted a subtle gradient. so yes, it was also partially so to the art production method as well.

so it’s an artistic decision driven by the technical limitations when even the BEST technician were working within an upper quality bound.

see the sister reply to yours in this thread. he was doing analog to digital with experts and they had to account for the fiddliness and that was a single step transfer.

see my other comment. the point is more that you are accounting for the loss inherent in analog to analog transfer. cell to film. film to film. film to analog. analog to crt. even just correcting for exposure in the film process you’re playing chicken between contrast and detail. that’s why those settings on tvs exist. it was very messy.

have you ever had to juggle a v-hold dial?

that’s why i put ‘dynamic range’ in quotes because it’s really about corrections to your detail and contrast and what gets lost, rather than the absolute capability of the signal, but it was the broadest answer without talking about things like photoshop exposure levels.

just because the relative range is the same, it doesn’t mean the consistency is. the analog signal and the color subcarrier chews the hell out of whatever you’re broadcasting. many family’s still had their 70s era color tvs which would be fuzzy and off tint well into the cable era. it was more about minimizing damage rather than achieving a pristine picture.

now that the hardware baseline is so good, you can count on that extra quality overhead to show up, even with the same rgb range.

there’s a reason component cables didn’t push past 1080i. you lost at literally EVERY transmission step before things went digital.

honestly, it’s why i bristle at the nit picks of most modern tech reviews. the cheapest walmart android tablet has better color calibration and picture quality than the most expensive consumer sony crt of the 90s. across the board the quality and consistency of everything from the signal to the image is better than what i grew up watching and using.

most of it is simply the result of the analog production process, and the losses inherent to each step. so you basically overshoot with bold colors so that it still looks decent at the other end.

older cartoons were produced with cells and photographic film. in that process you are literally blocking or transmitting light through both the cells themselves and the film both at the time they’re photographed and reproduced and eventually transferred to whatever electronic signal, which back then was also analog and had its own transmission loss.

every part of that process will result in a loss of both detail and ‘dynamic range’ so to speak because trying to pass a light through something while also having it be opaque is a conflicting process.

add into it all the other hand production methods, cell paintings, the relative quality of transfer technologies at the time, and yes the fact that its end was to show up either on a low res tv screen or a movie screen, which although capable of high detail theoretically, between multiple showings, flicker, and reproduction also be degraded.

in addition each color beyond just a flat reference color requires more attention to detail to keep consistency between artists etc.

we really take for granted how much the digital process has opened up for art reproducibility in the last 30 years.