Playing 1080p Blu-ray on 1080i TV

[Joe Cain]

is the only reason I've begun collecting BDs at all. Well, that and the PS3.

It's not a huge TV; it's CRT, and it's a year old---you can get LCD in the same size for the money now, but we only spent as much on it as we did on the SD TV it replaced; I think of it as a nice starter HDTV. The PS3 was admittedly a bit of an extravagance, but it came right after the price drop and a really bad year; sometimes you have to say "I could walk in front of a bus tomorrow---tonight I'm watching the movie in HD!"

For our solidly middle-class demographic we're a little ahead on the early adoption curve, I guess, but I think we've gotten good value for dollars spent on the HDM market. It helps that we're sentimentalists and Disney fans, and that Disney is solidly behind BD; if Disney were sitting it out or had gone HD-DVD exclusive, I would've settled on a nice upscaling DVD player for the next couple of years.

Clearly prices need to come down for TVs and players alike before HD will command a simple majority in the market. It will also help if adoption is made simple to the point of being stupid---the studios' embrace of a single format sure would be nice, which would help make 1080p the most attractive HDTV to sell at a mass market price point...