Am I missing something with HD ??

[Valleyman]

If you want to see the difference between HD hardware compared to SD hardware on your monitor change the resolution to 640x480, then change it back to 1280x720... Lots more detail eh? Even better try playing a game at 640x480 and then at 1280x720. It's an awsome difference.

An alternative is to open a word file on your PC, run it through your HD screen at 1280x720. You can read the text etc right? Now put the same resolution through a traditional CRT tv. The chances are you can't read the text easily. Now imagine the details that this can bring when you are looking at textures.

Your test of playing HD source through at different resolutions is a wee bit strange as you are looking at it on a small screen. With the motion blur and fast moving images of trailers a lower resoution will still look reasonably good and not THAT noticable. Thats why 15-20 inch LCD tvs are still often 640x480 resolution because HD won't show a major difference. I find 23" and above screens show a HUGE difference when running HD feeds.