A new study by Leichtman Research Group shows that 18 percent of HDTV owners can't tell the difference between high definition and standard definition content.
That means that nearly one in five people who have paid the price to get HD don't even know if what they're getting is the real, high-quality HD they wanted.
Perhaps this helps us understand why Blu-ray content has been so slow to catch on. Blu-ray may well be overrated, but there is still lots of debate over its merit.
Much of this may be due to the limitations of human perception, which at some point, begins to limit how much we care about quality.
As evidence, I present the widespread adoption of digital music, which in theory is inferior to analog recordings. While most of us can't tell the difference, many true audiophiles still prefer vinyl LPs to digital CDs of MP3s.
But that hasn't stopped iPods from taking over the world, simply because the average person doesn't care. I wouldn't be surprised if we started to run into the same phenomenon with video in the next few years.
While I won't make any predictions about where to draw the line, recent trends in HD and Blu-ray seem to suggest that we're getting close.
