Ultimately it's the technology that suffers, as the public slowly gets more and more pissed off that it isn't as awesome as USA Today or the salesman at Best Buy told them it would be.

Contrary to what you learned in your economics classes, the market isn't always about supply and demand. Sometimes it's the opposite: supplying some technology nobody wanted, then trying to create the demand for it with hype.

6 High-Definition TVs

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Last year Best Buy reported huge numbers of unexpected returns of high-definition TVs because many who bought the sets thought the picture looked "like someone rubbed cat shit on the screen." How is this possible? That's the entire point of HD TV--its ability to render today's most visually intense shows in crystal-clear detail.

Root Problems:

Consumer confusion, slow adoption.

It turns out the problem doesn't lie with the televisions; it lies with the people who buy them. Or, you could say it lies in the industry's inability to explain to those people what they're buying. It seems obvious to us computer- literate and sexually confident Internet users that if you buy an HDTV you still need an HD source--a special box from your cable company or satellite provider--to get an HD picture. But to your average Joe, who's used to plugging one wire into the back of his TV, this can be a frustrating realization.

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"What do you mean I need special cables?"

"What do you mean I need to rent a little box with it?"

"What do you mean I'll have to pay more monthly for the HD plan?"

"What do you mean my DVD player isn't high definition? What's 'Blu-ray?'"

"RAAARRRRGH!"

Then he goes into the other room and kicks his dog. This is the true face of animal abuse in America today: frustrated A/V installations.



from FlatPanelTV.org

According to a recent Nielsen study half of the people who own HD television sets don't use them with a high-definition source. Many of them don't even know.

That's a problem, because if you happen to watch any standard definition channels on your HD TV, you'll find the picture is now distorted on your widescreen set. If we wanted to see what Katie Couric looks like 40 pounds heavier, we'd Photoshop her head onto a fat guy's body, like any normal person.

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Sure you can fiddle with the picture settings to sort of resolve this; it'll likely require a couple of hours on the phone with a support center in India, and the resulting picture will still be a grainy mess. This is why Best Buy is getting irate customers dragging in returned sets with shattered holes in the screen the exact size and shape of an angry fist.

Eventually these problems will fade away, once the only type of television on store shelves is HD, and the only type of cable is HD, and the only type of DVD players for sale is HD. Mr. Johnny Average Consumer Idiot* won't have to take a six-week course to figure out what terms like HDMI and 1080p mean, because everything will be figured out for him.

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*Not a real person. If this is your real name, we are sorry. For a couple reasons.