HDTV is overrated by a large margin.

I got myself an HDTV, and I have to say that it's not all that wonderful. The component cables are really expensive if you want high quality stuff, the color red is horribly rendered in all modes, the picture can often times have a screen of vertical lines running through it due to the innate nature of the projection, and if you're running something that does not support 480p or higher...the picture looks plain god awful with excessive blurs, static, lack of solidity to images, and an unstable contrast.

Think twice about buying these things.

Standard NTSC sucks balls compared to other TV formats of the world, so the demand for a higher-quality replacement is naturally greater (as the old joke goes, NTSC = Never The Same Color). HDTV does look nice when it's set up really well with quality equipment and video sources, but it's still too early to integrate well with existing equipment (DVD, video games, etc). Early adopters always pay a higher price in both the cost of equipment and, in some respects, the quality - the fact that you can get a DVD player for $150 that does as much and more than the $1,500+ models when DVD first hit the shelves is testament to why you should wait for some technologies to be closer to mainstream than HDTV currently is.