Not sure if this is IMHO or CS.
If you have a hi-def TV and signal, are you happy with it? Some people that I’ve talked to are blown away and others are just meh. Which camp are you in?
I find that most people who are “meh” about HDTV are doing it wrong, by not using component or HDMI cables, or watching the standard definition channel rather than the HD version.
I love HDTV. The difference is striking.
Yes. Most of my high def viewing is sports. There is a significant difference and I rarely watch standard def sports at all.
I also have Blu Ray. While not every Blu Ray disc is lights years above a standard DVD, the are some which are amazing.
We have two HDTVs. One is an older 50 inch Hitachi LCD rear projection TV, and the other is a newer Vizio 37 inch LCD TV.
Wow!
It makes going back to our two 19 inch CRT TVs in the spare rooms akin to using a a rotary, black bakelite telephone.
I find it stunning for about the first 5 minutes…then I forget I’m watching a better picture (kinda like getting used to a smell). i’ve also found there’s good HD and AWESOME HD. The Planet Earth stuff was stellar, some of the second tier channels? not so much.
Enterprise was on an HD channel a little while back and it looked GREAT, Sci Fi (an HD channel) re-ran it and it sucked.
I like it plenty, though I’ll admit that most of my use is for video games. Almost more important to me than the HD itself is the 16:9 aspect ratio–watching, e.g., Mad Men from a SD DVD was still stunning.
To the left, though, HD channels are in somewhat short supply at the moment–my satellite carrier doesn’t have locals in HD in this area yet, so just about the only regular TV I see in HD is Robot Chicken and SW: The Clone Wars. The Clone Wars is quite impressive in HD, however–I can regularly see ‘brush strokes’ on the animated characters.
Bear in mind your HD carrier might be compressing their bandwidth, even with the real HD channels. Comcast has been caught doing this and the last time I checked, the complaints go nowhere.
We’ve got a Hi-Def TV and the difference between Hi-Def and Standard Def digital TV is noticeable but not worth the extra money unless you’re buying a TV with an in-built Hi-Def tuner, IMHO.
It does make all our DVDs look a lot nicer, though! 
I’m still blown away after a year of HDTV. I read somewhere that it’s like the early day of color TV. People will watch it and not care what’s on. That’s a bit of an overstatement, but I sometimes chose between channels based on the fact on is in HD. My DirecTV has finally added local channels and more HDTV generally, and I’m quite happy. Not as dramatic a life-changer as TiVo, but it’s nice. Like others have said, especially sports.
When I had HD channels, I liked it, but it isn’t worth the extra monthly bucks. Nor is it as good as Blu-Ray, which is stunning. Better than a movie theater
Agreed about Blu-ray being better than the movie theater. Yesterday I showed my friend the six James Bond movies I had bought on Blu-ray, and he couldn’t wait to watch them. When I told him about the free Quantum of Solace tickets that it came with and offered to take him, his reaction was best described as “meh”.
Now if you could drink beer at the movie theater, it might be a different story… 
What difference does it make if the tuner is built-in, or not? If it isn’t, most people can still watch HD channels through the cable or satellite box. Are you saying it isn’t worth getting an HD television if you aren’t going to watch HD programming on it?
Also, do they even sell HD sets without the tuner built into it anymore?
I love it. Some HD TV channels are better than others and some programs are better than others but overall it’s fantastic. Sports are fantastic in HD (again, only if they know what they’re doing).
Blu Ray is bad ass though. I absolutely love it. I finally got around to showing it to my girlfriend the other day and she was a little freaked out to be honest. It was a pretty cool reaction.
As an aside: Does anybody know what The Godfather looks like on Blu Ray? Is it worth it? In Canada it’s like 80 or 90 bucks for the trilogy and I really only want to buy it if it’s a really noticable improvement over the standard DVDs.
I say meh, but for a few reasons which I’m sure will change quickly over the years*. First off, I watch ZERO sports, but I have seen them on HD and they look great. But the big reason is that in order to watch something in HD, I have to watch it live (I have a TiVo S2), I have to switch my reciever to take a feed right off the cable box and change the input on the TV. Neither of them are big deals in and off themselves, but it’s annoying enough for me that I bought a special reviever to make sure that I don’t have to change inputs on the TV when switching from gamecube to TiVo to DVD. Also, since I now won’t be able to see or hear TiVo that means I have to make sure the TiVo isn’t going to be recording anything and if it does try to record something I have to blindly hit previous channel and the right sequence of buttons to tell it to stop the recording and change the channel. All of these things together make it not really worth my while to do it, especially for the shows that I watch.
*My current receiver upconverts all signals to component regardless of their input which is why I don’t have to switch inputs for anything. Actually what happens is they all switch to component, then go through a line doubler to interpolate them and make them look better on such a big TV. The line doubler outputs them to an RGB cable which goes to the TV, the cable box feed bypasses the doubler and goes right to the TV, hence having to switch inputs. I plan to, someday upgrade to a doubler that can accept a HD signal and do nothing but pass it through to the same output as all the other signals.
Man, have I got a theater for you then.
Absolutely love my HD/big screen/surround. My wife couldn’t care less, but I’ve turned my daughter, so I’m happy. I love watching football (I just wish I had a better team than the 'Skins to enjoy), and prime time shows are beautiful.
I haven’t seen Blue Ray yet and I don’t think I want to until I’m at a point where I can actually get it if I see that’s it’s really better than what I have now. DVDs on my system are upconverted and show up just fine.
I’m really lovin’ the HD. My current kick is over-the-air HD; I hooked up an antenna in my attic to get the local channels, and I’ve just ordered an antenna and associated gear for my parents so they can have the same beautiful HD experience.
I’ve heard they don’t compress the OTA signals as much as they do on cable or satellite, so the picture is a lot “cleaner”. The size of the recorded programs on the DVR seem to bear that out; a one-hour program off the dish may take up 1.5-3 GB, while a one-hour show off the antenna fills 6-8 GB. Whatever the reason, the local channels I get from the antenna look absolutely stunning compared to some of the stuff I get off the satellite.
No, I’m saying it isn’t worth buying a stand-along High Definition Set Top Box unless you’ve got a decent LCD TV.
And if you’ve got a decent LCD TV then you should have one with an HD Tuner in it; if you don’t (have an in-built HD tuner), then I wouldn’t bother paying the extra for and HD box, if that makes sense.
I can really tell the difference in my video games. The HD from the Xbox 360 is definitely superior to my old Xbox or Wii. TV programs, not so much. I never really saw much difference from the SD feed of a program I also had available in HD. I’ve got a relatively cheap LCD TV though, so I take to heart the old adage, “you get what you pay for.” More expensive sets on display in stores usually appear better. Those seem to often be tuned to sports games though - those seem to really be HDTV’s bread-and-butter.
Put me in the “meh” crowd. As others have said, sports and things like Planet Earth are definitely clearer, but five minutes later, I forget I’m watching it. If I’m watching on a regular TV, five minutes later I don’t notice it either.
What I do notice is that ALL channels on the stupid Time Warner Scientific Atlanta HDTV box, seem to take a while to show up when you first turn the TV on with the HD box. At random points, the HD box decides not to list what the program is that’s playing, saying “Not Available”, and then there is my personal favorite, which is where the box freezes, or the program comes in, but every two minutes, the screen goes black and it says “Please Wait…” and the picture comes in for another two minutes and the process repeats forever. The solution? Unplug the box and plug it back in - at which point the box takes 20 minutes to reboot.
I was convinced the box was broken and went to get another one from the cable company. Same problem with the new one. I’m dealing with it, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten fed up with the B.S. and gone upstairs to watch T.V. on the non-HD box because of the hassles when the HD box is randomly acting up and needs to be re-set.