I was at wal-mart the other day, and spent about 2 hours looking at their TVs. I was amazed I saw HDTVs from 200$ Up to 1500$. What amazed me more, was I saw a 42inch LCD HDTV for 950$. As I was leaving I noticed something major. The smallest TVs were HDTVS. The biggest were HDTVs. The cheapest were HDTVs. And the most expensive were HDTVs. Wait. Where's the SDTVs?!?!

My local wal-mart no-longer sells SDTVs. HDTV is here, HDTV is today. It is no longer the future.

EDIT: HDTV is still the future as well, but it is also the present. 

Here in Spain, there aren't many Sdtvs either, but what i feel is that people don't know that they are buying Hdtvs, they only want a tv of 42'' or a tv of 20'' but they don't mind how many pixels they have.

plenty of SDTVs here still

True but that doesn't necessarily mean that people are buying them specifically for High Def. Form factor and the very fact that there are fewer and fewer SDTVs being offered by stores are largely responsible for the uptake of HD sets.

Not many SD's here in Switzerland either, but most "normal" people buy a TV Set once in 10 years or so, so it'll take quite some time til the future is the present...

Idunno. I'm eyeing that 42inch LCD. It has bad reviews, but I'm gonna be putting a TV in a semi-truck. It's gonna go through HELL and back. I dont want to invest that much in a... more expensive brand. Still. That will be my 3rd HDTV.

Looks like the regional differences are huge.

Here in Finland I know only 1 person with a HDTV. I've tried asking around if people have even heard of the HD formats, and so far only nerds like me have even known the names of Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

This is Nokia-land, mind you, not some 3rd world country.

Between manufacturing and shipping costs LCD TVs are far cheaper for electronics companies than their CRT counterparts; on top of that CRT and Rear Projection TVs have become really unpopular due to their large form factor and clunky apearance. The end result is people are willing to pay more for a LCD TV and they're less expensive to manufacture and ship so manufacturers/retailers are phasing out CRT TVs ...

Now, if you look at the surveys that have been done somewhere between 2/3 and 4/5 of all High Definition televisions are still displaying standard definition television signals (with little intention to move to High Definition) and most DVD players are hooked up to these televisions using composite cables (meaning they're not even running the DVD players in progressive scan). What this means is that people are either poorly informed on what High Definition is or have no real interest in High Definition content.

Basically, Standard Definition Televisions are disapearing because of reasons other than the popularity of high definition.

here is the same, people don't know anything about blue-ray, hddvd, or hdtvs, neither people who own the ps3 know what are the improvements of blue ray, though sony is always advertising it on tv, i think that the next gen. will be the real hd gen.

As someone above said, a TV is usually a 10+ year investment. Why buy a standard definition set now when for only a small amount more you can get a HDReady set (remember, most of the HDTVs you see at the moment, espeically the small ones, don't have 1920x1080 pixels).

I can't imagine it costing that much more just to produce a larger amount of 'HD Ready' LCD panels rather than having both HD and SD panel in production (it is probably cheaper actually).