My family just bought an HDTV. I now know why HDTVs are not yet mainstream. It's not because they're too expensive. It's because they suck. According to the TV's user manual, we can't watch 4:3 broadcasts in standard 4:3 mode more than 15% of the time, or else we will unevenly burn the TV's phosphors and make 16:9 sources look bad. Instead, we have to watch 4:3 sources in 16:9 mode, with everyone stretched out to look fat. We bought a CRT projection TV specifically so that we could get several resolutions and watch 1080i, 720p, 480p and 480i sources without scaling, but it's moot because we still have to scale standard 4:3 broadcasts, which is what we will be watching 90% of the time. In my mind there is a rather obvious solution to the phosphor burn-in problem: the TV should analyze the signal and dynamically change the brightness of the side bars in 4:3 mode to match the average brightness of the center screen, preventing uneven burning of the phosphors. Apparently this idea never occurred to the engineers who designed our TV. Due to poor design, our new HDTV looks much worse than our old TV for standard low-def sources. We collectively have buyers' remorse.