As I see it the biggest stumbling block for HD adoption is not the greatness of the features the wuality of the picture or the Flatness of the monitor.... it's the start-up cost.
Think about it, in order to fully adopt either HD format you're looking at spending over or near $1500 for the cheapest models of television and players. Even you if you bought the PS3 you're looking at $800 to $1000 for the TV. Another $399 for the console (if you buy the shitty 40GB model), an additional $100 in accessories and component cables. and to top it all off an aditional $10-$15 per movie that you want to buy and then the government takes another 7-10% of the purchase price out of your wallet. Or if you rent expect to be gouged by $2-$4 dollars per HD rental (if your local rental shop even has them). In short, your talking about $1600-$2000 start-up minimum, not to mention an indeterminate amount of additional money per month over DVD in rentals and movie purchases.
This level of start up is not feasible for a good majority of households right now. According to wikipedia (not the most reliable source but I'm too lazy to find others) the average household income is 48k or roughly 4,000 a month. Taking into account a mortgage payment, utilities, car payment, car insurance, cost of eating food, gasoline consumption, health insurance costs and other necessities, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who has $2000 extra lying around to spend on full conversion imeadiately.
Notice I said this was an average, if you read further into the wiki article you find that the likley hood of full conversion becomes less feasible as it shows a table of income broken up into fifths with the lowest 3/5 earning less than $34,000 a year. That's 60% of housholds in the US!
What ends up happening when families do convert to HD, is that they might buy the TV or the PS3 this year for Christmas or Tax-return. Then the following year they may buy the player or the TV, if they don't have something else they want that suppercedes luxury.
Until the cost of Full conversion comes down another 30%-40% you can expect the number of people adopting these things to be restricted to videofiles, single people (who don't have money consuming vices; i.e Women, booze, drugs, or gambling), couples without children and the top 20% of Americans. In the best case scenario that leaves only 35% of Americans total.
