My family has an HDtv and I absolutely hate it. I can see rather large square pixels in many scenes and the contrast ratio is atrocious. I've basically had to train my eyes to tolerate a blurry and fuzzy picture. Some of my vhs tapes like Titanic with a good vcr on our standard tv look better. I will still watch most widescreen movies on our standard tv downstairs. Our old tube tv was so much better but it was unfortunately wearing out. By the way, how good of an improvement could we expect if we upgraded our component cables that run from the dvr box to the tv to digital connectors like HDMI?

Other than the contrast ratio, most dvd's look pretty good on our HDtv even though we use a portable dvd player with composite imputs. The unaltered movies actually look pretty good. I like how they look better than the 2004 discs because the screwed up colors and darkened image looks even worse with a poor contrast ratio tv. The anamorphic image with the special editions does not look that noticeably better in my case.

I looked at my E. T. disc on our HDtv and our standard rear projection Mitsubishi tv. I had to make the contrast about 25% on the projection tv to equal the maximum contrast on the HD one.
Here's an example of poor contrast ratio with a screenshot from Blade Runner. The top is the original image and the bottom is what I would likely see with the Sony Wega HDtv.

[URL=http://www.imghut.net/show.php?img=9806][/URL]