Okay, here's the problem. Most 35mm films only have around 2k discernible detail on them. Digital is the future, because the film can be made to look the way it was supposed to look - richer blacks, whither whites, full balanced colour, etc. Others disagree and I can see that, fact is that digital can reproduce everything on the film AND remove the negative effects of film. If you don't believe me, see if a 16mm film version of your favourite movie looks better than the DVD.MaximRecoil said:
Using something like Blu-ray discs, and an analog scheme like LaserDisc (but with something better than the composite domain, such as RGB) — if transferred from a 35mm negative, or better yet, a 70mm negative — could the quality of a 35mm film print be matched or bettered?
Something like that combined with a high-end CRT projector (to keep it all analog) like a Sony G90 with a 150 kHz scan rate (well beyond 1080p) would allow commercial theater quality and the look of film right at home, without the hassles (such as switching reels), huge expense, and potential legal red tape of owning actual 35mm film prints.
It is too bad that some of the best CRT projectors can handle well beyond 1080p, yet the highest quality consumer analog format that can be fed to them is something like LaserDisc or S-VHS. Yes, they display digital 1080p content, but media that's high resolution and completely analog would be really cool. It would probably be indistinguishable from a film print when viewed on an analog display.
Of course the tweaking is done (preferably) at the saning stage, because in the digital stage your loosing colour fidelity. I doubt you'd notice the difference in most instances between 2k and 4k. And 1080p just about captures 2k as it is. That said, there are certainly movies with the detail to go to and beyond 4k in fine detail, and you're left with a simple question - does it save more space to compress it? Or does it save more space to store it in an analogue format? I'll let you figure out the answer.