High Definition TV....Is It What it Says it Is?

I recently bought a new TV and found that traditional CRT TVs were very hard to find in my local electronics stores, other than small portables. They were almost exclusively stocking Plasma and LCD flat screen sets. Now I'm not going to deny that they are much prettier than CRT TVs, but I found the picture quality to be almost universally appalling. The pictures were very blurry and pixelled as well. On those rare occasions that there were CRT and LCD or plasma TVs side by side in the shop, a blind man could have seen that the CRT picture was far superior. One of the reasons for this is that flat panel TVs are designed to cope with the resolution of high definition (HD) TV, with standard definition (SD) pictures being zoomed to fill the screen. Quite often the TV doesn't do a particularly good job of this, making the picture look nasty (think of when you have a video clip on your PC and then go 'full screen' and the picture looks much worse). Therefore, the logical conclusion is that HD TVs are a bit of a mistake if you predominantly watch normal TV - which is of course what we will all be doing for quite a while to come - even Sky only have a handful of HD Channels among their lineup of hundreds of SD channels.