There are many worthwile movies you can't find anywhere (legally) unless you own the DVD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues
And then there are the ye olde Criterion Collection DVDs with exclusive extras like commentary tracks that can't be reprinted because of licensing issues.
Or the high seas...
And honestly a ton of why dvds look so terrible is people forgot about deinterlacing. Toggle it on and things look a lot better.
As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film. Yeah, for some old 80s-90s show that was tragically shot on videotape, it's going to look like shit no matter what, so you're just stuck with that unfortunately.
Doesn't matter when they remaster it to be way too dark or screw up with colours and tone mapping to give it a "more modern" tint.
Some are also re-cut from original aspect ratios (whether 4:3 or CinemaScope) to be equal or closer to 16:9.
e.g The Wire on DVD is 4:3 (as originally shot) and has been re-framed to 16:9 on BD. They did a a seriously good job at it but it really changes the impact and/or mood of some key scenes. And that's when it goes well.
On the other end of the spectrum I've seen 2.55:1 movies butchered into some lazy [anything-between 1.77 and 2]:1 crop + autopan conversion "remaster". Those are 1080p alright and not upscales but are a totally shoddy cash-grab job.
https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-service/4K-UHD...
I don't think anyone upscaled a dvd recently for release on BR though, was mainly an issue right around when BR came out in the rush to get content out. Same with UHDs, today it shouldn't be as much of an issue.
The movie studios still manage to mess it up, changing the colors/contrast and using terrible AI de-noising that wipes out actual details
Mine is a 1080p model. I have seen 4K TVs at friends houses but I can't say I miss it. Somehow the when you watch some old non HD it still looks good when projected on a wall. Sure it is not highres but the image seems smoothen the image instead of having a pixelated or badly upscaled result. For example these last few months I have been watching a lot the ER TV show and I wasn't the least annoyed by the lower res.
If you want to see what a modern 4K TV can really do, you have to watch it with something new, shot in 4K, perhaps in HDR if the TV can render that (this works best if the TV is OLED; LCD TVs don't have the brightness to really show HDR properly). Watching the same media on your 1080p projector should look noticeably worse than your friend's 75" OLED set.
That is exactly what I am trying to say. While I have an overall lower max res, my viewing experience is much more consistent across all kind of contents. And it never feels as crappy as upscaled content.
>If you want to see what a modern 4K TV can really do, you have to watch it with something new, shot in 4K, perhaps in HDR if the TV can render that (this works best if the TV is OLED; LCD TVs don't have the brightness to really show HDR properly). Watching the same media on your 1080p projector should look noticeably worse than your friend's 75" OLED set.
I know I've seen it at friends place. But what I mean is I don't really feel it unless I compare both side by side thus it doesn't make my viewing experience less enjoyable. Ignorance is bliss I guess. And I much prefer the immersion of having an albeit lower res projected in the full size of my living room wall than 4K res in a smaller screen. It would maybe be different if I was watching ice hockey games and trying to follow the puck but I am not.
YMMV of course.
The biggest problem visible on the TNG sets is the black cardboard pieces on the consoles in the rear of the bridge, used to block reflections from the lights. Those weren't visible after conversion to NTSC, but in HD they're noticeable. I'm not a director, but I wouldn't call this a problem with a shoddy set, but rather too many assumptions made at the time about how the video would be viewed. Surely, if they were filming a theatrical movie at the time instead of a TV show, they would have simply filmed it a different way, or rigged the lighting differently to avoid this problem.
That doesn't just meant that smaller details weren't important, so they were left out. But also that if something in your set needs to fulfill a role in the story, you better make that thing big enough to be legible on an NTSC screen, instead of something more subtle.
If you decrypt and grab the pristine content of a 4:3 or 16:9 DVD, then process it properly through Handbrake or such, it will look fine.
I did this purposely for a couple of rare old movies because the VHS and streaming copies looked terrible. The DVD versions in various regions are much, much better and came out as playable artifacts I can put on an 4K or 8K output device. They look cleaner than when I play these than with a DVD player because of the extra computational effort that went into the filtering during the transcoding process.
Also, the parent seemed to be talking about simply popping a DVD into a drive and watching that directly. What you're talking about sounds very interesting, but also a fair amount of work and compute time. I've never used Handbrake, but I would assume the ripping and transcoding process would take a fair amount of time.