How retailers are unknowingly slowing HiDef adoption

[aristotles]

I thought 720p was good enough for a long time because most Blu-ray players and the 1080p TVs set up in stores were calibrated incorrectly.

Most of the time I saw Sony 1080p LCDs displaying blu-ray using the Vivid preset on the TV which overly emphasizes the film grain as a kind of mosquito noise by over-saturating colours and over-sharpening the picture with the noise filter turned off. I found that this effect was equally applicable to both formats and turning on the default "standard" preset got rid of the mosquito noise while retaining all of the visible detail in the picture.

On a somewhat related note, I also believed my Prima had a much better upscaler for analogue cable than all Sony displays again because of the store messing up the presets to make SD TV look worse than it is.

In their zeal to sell me a HD cable box, they caused me to hold off buying a 1080p HDTV for over a year because of those shenanigans.