This seems fairly common. I was having aggravating sound drop-outs and occasional blockiness and stuttering, and when I swapped out my FiOS box all of the problems went away.

But I do see quite a few compression artifacts on FiOS HD channels, depending on the quality of the original stream. For instance, watch one of the rock-video channels (we have MTV, Palladia, and VH1) and wait for something with a lot of strobe lighting. Block city. I see color-banding on occasion, and a lot of the programming on the movie channels has been high-pass filtered to remove fine detail, either before or during the compression process, to improve the efficiency of the codec. These programs can look very good, but the Blu-ray version will almost certainly look better.

The big channels -- specifically the network affiliates -- tend to look really, really good in HD. But during football games, for example, I see some pretty bad motion artifacting, especially as the camera pans quickly across the field. With the old technology (MPEG-2) that's still in use throughout the industry, the bandwidth that those streams have to fit in just isn't quite high enough to do the trick.

Still a huge, huge improvement over digital SD, don't get me wrong. Even something like The Daily Show, which is produced in SD and upconverted to HD for broadcast on Comedy Central HD, looks leagues better with the extra bandwidth alloted to the HD stream. And occasionally I'll be channel-flipping and get stopped by a program like Lawrence of Arabia on HDNet Movies or To Catch a Thief on MGM HD that's just so gorgeous I have to pause and admire it for a while.

Love my HD, love my Blu-ray collection. It's a sizable investment, but I try to make it pay every day. Our friends enjoy it, too.

YES. Here's the real problem. If you call up the average schmoe with an upconverting DVD player connected to an HDTV and ask him if he has "an HD DVD player" I'd wager that at least three times out of 10 that guy says, "Uh-huh."

Leaving that aside, the linked Web site is trying to make a faulty extrapolation from the data. I own an Xbox HD DVD drive that I haven't powered up since last October, a PS3, maybe three or four HD DVD discs and about 90 Blu-ray titles. And yet I do not own a "Blu-ray player." But if I had responded to this survey, my participation would have been used as evidence that Blu-ray adoption is soft. Nuh-uh.

Your music collection fits on a single DVD-R? Guess you're not an especially interested consumer of music. Hell, Neil Young's latest release takes up ten (10) Blu-ray Discs, which hold up to 50 GB each. Good luck streaming *that* on demand.

Wait, wait. How do "fewer flashy effects" and "shorter game" translate to "game won't be as good?"

To me, that's a big problem in the games industry today. I don't *need* to have a game that pushes the limits of my hardware in terms of speed-rendering of pixillated occluded chiaroscuro texture-bitmapped-film-grain XYZ-spline enabled whiskers on the cheeks of my characters. I don't *need* to have a game that takes 45 goddamned hours to play through in "story mode."

What I *need* is a game that's fun, stylish, and/or challenging. I need a game that's clever and compelling. If that means it's not a compete pixel-buster, or that it only takes 15-20 hours to play through (think of the terrific books I could be reading in 20 hours of gaming time!), fine. If it makes me smile, laugh, cringe, squeal with joy and/or toss my controller into the corner with rage mere milliseconds before jumping up from the couch to fetch it so I can try that devilish level just one ... more ... time ... (at 3 a.m. on a school night), that's good enough.

And if that game can cost $20 or $30 instead of $60, I'll be a lot more likely to experience it for myself. Also, if games were that cheap, many of the publishers might experience the knock-on benefits of torpedoing that lucrative used-games racket that GameStop has perfected. Given the sheer volume of used games in the market, I wonder what the average # of owners is for any given new $60 release?