I should add that during a fight the icons were perfectly fine and not at all hard to see.

i played it form start to finish on a SDTV.

shoulder buttons were indeed hard to decipher. Additionally when your character is nervous or exited the possible choices circling around your head where ok to read, but the icons for the square and circle buttons next to the circling choices were just unreadable.

In the end, i was still able to steer the story and perform action as i wanted. So yes Heavy Rain is playable and enjoyable on a SDTV, although occasionally read errors will occour.

I have a 19 inch SD T.V. and the text is hard to read.

I've got a friend who has had the PS3 since launch and on an SDTV and he completed the game and he never mentioned any problems. I played it a little bit over there as well and I guess it is a little harder to read but it is still very readable.

That's good to hear it's not as bad as I suspected it might be on SDTV's.

I guess I'm just blind. :-p