I noticed that. Was with some relatives over Christmas, and they had an HDTV. One of the shows was looking a little weird and didn't act like the others, even after playing with the zoom a bit - then it struck me, the black bars weren't being added by the TV, the broadcast station itself was adding the bars!

Another thing that was amusing was this: They had satellite, and HD costs extra, and they didn't pay the extra so the satellite was all SD. But over the airwaves, it's all advertising paid, and many stations switched to HD, so they were getting a far better picture with the antenna than with the satellite!! That was so ironic.

The general impression I've gotten from talking to a wide range of "experts" in the field is:

If you're mainly going to watch TV, go for plasma, it's more forgiving on defects, and will give you a more comfortable experience.

If you want to connect your computer and do websurfing, go LCD, plasma is not accurate enough for a perfect image pixel per pixel.

The cheap TVs (discounted or not) use several years old panel technology (I've seen TVs using 5 years old panel technology, even though being a "new" model...) ... Don't expect getting something good just because the TV you consider buying had a double pricetag last year. A midrange TV generally has last years (sometimes even 2 year old) panels, which means that the TV you buy now at a great discount has at least 2 years old technology... So if you want a quality TV, buy one that was top of the line last year, it'll cost you more, but it'll be a recent panel... (It's not *always* true, so better research a bit before deciding). Ofcourse, buying a TV with state of the art panel is the "best" option, but that comes with a huge pricetag.

It took awhile for people to start realizing if your recieving HD content through a cable box or satellite reciever the signal is compressed and if you live within 100miles or so of your local stations you can get a much better uncompressed HD signal just with rabbit ears.