High definition sets are now selling in serious volume, and I would guess a large fraction of the people who own one have never seen a high definition picture on it.
The sequence goes like this. The television is delivered. It replaces a cathode ray tube that had a cable box sitting on top of it. The same cable box is connected to the new screen with the same lead that was already there, because it reaches and it fits and nothing on screen suggests a problem. What arrives is a standard definition signal, stretched to fill a panel with roughly six times the pixels.
That looks worse than the old set did. Not slightly worse. Enlarging a soft image does not add anything, it only makes the softness bigger, and the compression artefacts that were invisible at twenty-eight inches are plainly visible at forty-two.
So a substantial number of people have spent a lot of money to make their television worse, and have concluded that the technology is overrated.
Back in January I noted that the industry was selling 1080p panels with almost nothing capable of feeding them. Eight months on the displays have got cheaper and more numerous, and the source problem has barely moved.
Broadcasters offer a handful of channels in high definition and the rest of the schedule is unchanged. The ones that do exist are frequently compressed hard, because bandwidth on a cable system is finite and a high definition channel eats several standard ones, so what you receive is a high resolution transmission of a heavily degraded picture. Sport survives this better than anything with dark scenes in it.
Nobody in the chain is motivated to explain any of it. The shop wants to sell the panel and the cable operator wants to keep the subscription, and the person who would have to say something awkward about your cable being the wrong kind is a salesperson working on commission.
What this needs is a source that is obviously and unmistakably better, packaged so that connecting it correctly is the only option available. A disc player with one type of socket on the back would do it. Until then the tipping point being announced is a tipping point in display sales, which is a different thing from people watching in high definition, and the two are being reported as though they were the same.