I don't have an HDTV and I don't think I'm going to buy one in the foreseeable future. I watch TV every evening for a couple of hours. I like TV fine.

I have analog basic cable that requires no set-top box and for which I pay around $40 a month (it's bundled with my cable Internet, so it's hard to say). I live in a rural area on an island -- I really doubt that I get any HD programming over the air. If I bought an HDTV, my cable rates would climb a minimum of $20 as I would have to pay for digital cable, set-top box "rental," and an HDTV package.

Every broadcast show I watch -- everything -- I watch via time-shifted Tivo. If I had HDTV, I would either have to buy a new DVR ($$$) or give up 20 minutes per hour to commercials.

My favorite channels are old-time movie channels (TCM and AMC) and Comedy Central, which I don't think broadcast in HD. My understanding is that non-HD shows look somewhere between worse-than-before to terrible on an HDTV.

I have a 27" diagonal set. HDTVs are 16:9, so I believe that a 36" HDTV would provide around the same picture size for broadcast TV.

I watch DVDs from Netflix. DVDs are, what?, 720P? And presumably, you can somehow set them up so that the 16:9 HDTV shows them fullscreen. So those would look better.

So, I buy an HDTV for, say, $2500. Plus maybe $50 per month in recurring charges. In order to get a no-better picture for my favorite shows, watch new HD shows with commercials and without time-shifting, and get an incremental improvement in DVDs?

<GeekTone value="Spock">Highly illogical.</GeekTone>

Update: I grabbed 486i from some Google search for "NTSC" but after being mocked, I double-checked. So I guess standard TV is 484i. And HDTV's are 9:5, not 16:9? And DVDs are only ~480 resolution?