Boy, this is a lot of good information. Thanks, everybody. Somebody (I can't seem to find it now) suggested that I might have enough space for a RPTV. Let me explain why I don't as a quick tangent. I got an entertainment center in conciliation to my wife. The opening for the TV is taller than it is wide (or it might be square), thus, I can fit more 4:3 tube than 16:9 tube. But I can't fit an RPTV because I don't have enough vertical space. Plus, I still just don't like the way RPTVs look. Of course, if I could convince the wife to get a 60" TV, that argument would go out the window, but that would be nigh impossible and I don't really have -- oh -- they're not as much as I thought. There goes that argument.

Anyway, I just went down to the local Circuit City, because I didn't feel like bothering the real video electronics store folks yet, and looked at the TVs they had, just to get a feel. They had the same video running on all the TVs. It was a 16:9 signal, as the non-HDTVs showed it squashed, but when I asked an employee what kind of signal it was, he was unable to answer. (``What does 1080i mean?'' was one of the questions he asked me.) I was blown away by the clarity of the HDTVs, but if it was an HDTV signal, then that's not going to mean anything to me. So unless anyone knows what it is they might have been showing (there was a Melissa Etheridge concert with a VH1 bug in it), I'll have to wait and go to the real store to compare. Also, one of the things that I noticed was that the HDTVs had no gaps between pixels (bad terminology, I'm sure) -- it was a solid wash of color, whereas the NTSC TVs had a lot of black mixed in with the video. I'd noticed this before, but I'd never noticed how prominent it was. Anyone know if that lack of black will also exist when viewing NTSC?