A recent trip over the holidays to my soon-to-be in-laws, I was able to watch a little Dish Network on an amazingly good-looking Vizio 46-inch HDTV LCD set. Beside the picture quality, I was impressed with the fact that Dish Network had so many compelling HD channels that you can’t find on DirecTV. Many of the VOOM channels provided needed eye candy including sports like windsurfing and big wave tow-in surfing as well as other extreme sports that are well suited to get the best from HDTV sets. Another channel that I watch a lot of in standard definition is Food Network. I am disappointed in their move away from technical cooking shows like Malto Mario toward the easier to digest “Throwdown with Bobby Flay” shows. However if Barefoot Contessa is on in HD, I gotta tell you I want to see that pearly bead of sweat on her brow glisten in HD as she tries to sell us on why it’s perfectly normal and reasonable to put another entire stick of butter into her next artery clogging dish.

Compared to a few years ago there is a lot more on in HD on the old satellite, and with Blu-ray, HD DVD and even a few left over D-VHS tapes in the old collection, I am never too far away from something good in HD. Another issue is when your video gets as good as even today’s least expensive HDTV sets can look – the reality kicks in that you can upconvert a DVD and make it look pretty damn good, but even with the most powerful video processors, its hard if not impossible to make standard definition look even passable on the best of 1080p HDTVs and projectors. It’s not the fault of the HDTVs, its just hard to take a stinky turd and polish it into a shiny gem no matter how hard you rub.

The question that begs to be asked is – are we better off waiting to invest in HDTV players and sets or will more and more sets installed in the market simply make HD more and more of a reality that networks, providers and content creators must deal with? As far as HDTVs go, it seems the more that sell the better things seem to get. As people wheel out one big, flat HDTV after another from Costcos and Best Buys all over the country – the more providers pay attention to the needs of the HD user, who from the beginning have been pretty stuck out in the cold. The consumer hold-up is more with players such as Blu-ray and HD DVD machines. They are expensive, quirky, and not as easy to connect as you might think, and that has many early adopters waiting to jump in the game. But is that helping anything? When starved for HD content – these players when paired with a Netflix or Blockbuster subscription, you’ve got yourself a pretty strong injection of HD content. Who cares which side wins – if there is going to be a winner in the format war? What I care most about is more HD content. Maybe when I get back to the future with my system I will return home to find all of the channels Dr. Brown was promising in the 1080i resolution that Jessica Simpson was babbling about. In the meantime, it’s time to invest in an HD disc player and learn what your 1080p HDTV really can do because it simply won’t be an overnight phenomenon for us to rid ourselves of the plague known as standard definition television.