[QUOTE
Maybe someone who knows about film and stuff might be able to explain the technical terms, but that's what I read a while ago. That explains why the old film looks so amazing in HD. Because the film always looked that good. It's just taken our broadcast networks, and home-televisions, that long to get to the point where we could view it enmasse.[/QUOTE]
Finally going to film school pays off

Depending on exposure, which really determines "resolution" of analogue film formats, film will always be (especially black and white) higher resolution than "HD", HD is actually pretty low on the scale. Some negative Super 8 film stocks will appear higher resolution than most HD recordings. However, there is no real measurable way, other than visually looking at film to determine it's resolution. But, if we were to give it a number, film comes out around 8-12K, so 8000 being our horizontal scan, instead of 1920 as in the case of HD. 12K being a large film format, like 65mm or 70mm used in IMAX. 35mm film, as it is, has been used since Edison days has the capabilities of being crystal clear, but once again, it depends on exposure. When film is exposed, it's a chemical reaction that causes tiny shards of metal to react to light, the more properly exposed, the more of these appear to replicate an image. Poorly exposed images (I'm sure we've all got back a roll) appear flat and lacking of dynamics. Check out some HD transfers of Chaplin films, you can see the line of his makeup, which is what it would have been like in the theaters in the 1920's. A lot of Vietnam footage was shot on 16mm, invented in the 1920's, had really made strides to imitate the clarity of 35mm. However, some of Vietnam footage shot after 1965, would have been shot on Kodak's new Super 8 film, this footage will appear shaky and dated. Prior to 1965, all personal camera's would have been standard 8mm, not as shaky, but still appear dated. However, with most of these formats, they would still transfer very well to HD, the Super 8 revealing the most film grain. But I'd rather have film grain than encoding artifacts! The reason the Vietnam footage we saw before these awesome HD transfers looked SO dated was because they were transferred to BETA tape (The Pro format, not the short lived consumer BETA-MAX), and thus reducing their dynamics in clarity, color and resolution to a mere 480i.