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Now that HDTV is almost everywhere, standard-definition TV can be seen for what it is: horrible.  Many people, of course, still have standard sets at home, but by now everyone has seen an HDTV in action, and it’s hard not to be impressed.  The Bits blog today discusses how the last four years have really seen the format rise to prominence.  Eric Taub cites the number of hours of HD coverage at the Beijing games versus those held in Athens, and it’s clear that high-def is now standard.

I watched tons of coverage of the Athens games, but I doubt a second of it was in high-def, since I didn’t know anyone at the time with an HD set.  Apparently, in Athens, NBC’s high-def coverage was entirely separate from their network coverage, with different camera angles and announcers.  This year, every second of the games is being broadcast in HD, and the quality is really outstanding if you can see it.  While in South Carolina last week I didn’t have access to an HDTV (which is surprising considering that the much less expensive Hyatt Park Place near O’Hare had a gigantic plasma screen, and this fancy-pants Westin in Hilton Head didn’t), so I had to make do.  But knowing what I was missing made it less enjoyable.

Of course, at the moment, my two year old HDTV is dying a painful death, and is basically unwatchable.  It was the first high-def set I saw for under $500, and since it looked so much better than the standard-def sets that were still the most commonly available at Best Buy at the time, the “Insignia” was what we bought.  But what remorse!  The top third of the picture is about half again as bright as the bottom two thirds, and above a very distracting line across the screen the picture is extraordinarily distorted, so that a round shape (like, say, a human head) is stretched into a long oval, and parallel lines curve inward toward some unseen horizon.  It’s enraging.

So we clearly need a new television, and, obviously, HD is the only way to go.  On one hand, prices for televisions seem astonishingly high compared to a decade ago.  But that may be because in 1998 most people only had a TV of thirty inches or less.  I remember when a thousand dollar TV was automatically a gigantic appliance that took up about ten square feet of floor space.  Now that same thousand dollars will buy you a pretty large flat screen HDTV that may even mount on the wall.  So, while the average American household now probably spends twice what they did a decade ago on their TV sets, they get something much better.