The quick conclusions, followed by a more in-depth breakdown w/ fun charts below: A huge proportion of gamers have gone HD, with PS3 owners leading in higher-end setups—71 percent gaze at some sort of HDTV, and 54 percent are enveloped by surround sound, with the 360, and surprisingly, the Wii not too far behind on either front.

That the 360 barely trails PS3 HD rates with 66 percent isn't mind-blowing—it and the PS3 are geared toward HD and higher end gamers, and have bigger pricetags to match (so if you can afford 'em it's more likely you can afford HD). Plus, both support an HD disc format, so it's no wonder they blow the Wii out of the water in movie watching (which managed 14 percent despite not officially supporting DVD playback). But a certifiably surprising 65 percent of Wii owners in this survey have HD setups, just 1 percent fewer than the 360.

You see the same thing with surround sound—48 percent of 360 owners have surround, and 43 percent of Wii owners. There is a bit more of a stratification, since the PS3 leads hard in 7.1 adoption, with the Wii trailing most visibly here and shooting way ahead in stock TV speaker usage.
One big blind spot in the study is that (or at least in this report of it) is console cross-ownership. My feeling is that owners of multiple consoles are much more likely to have HD setups w/ surround sound since they've likely got more coin and are more serious about their home theater setup, as well as consumer electronics generally. Like, I would bet that a big chunk of the Wii HD adopters also own a 360 or PS3, though it's clear gamers all around want to see prettier pictures and hear bigger booms. [CEPro via Max Console via Kotaku]

We took an HD gander at NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and HDNet, to see who delivered the crispiest, most colorful and most gorgeous HDTV signal of all.

For our eyeball test, we looked at a typical array of HDTV stations on our Samsung 1080p reference monitor, delivered via Time Warner Cable in the medium market of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sure, some of the differences might be in the local transmitters, but this is a pretty good representative sample of HDTV content delivery in the US circa early 2007. We took some pictures, all at the same F-stop and shutter speed, and along with those are a few value judgments.

NBC
This picture had a bit of a green tint—notice W's hair looking a little green. The overall sharpness of the picture was just medium compared to the others. There were a few more compression artifacts noticeable in the moving areas, and the sound was rather tinny, with a little too much boost in the midrange for my taste. Grade: B

Fox
This can't be HDTV. In fact, it's not. This is just a widescreen feed, and looked quite blurry compared to the others. Nevertheless, the colors looked more saturated than in the other feeds, and the sound was quite good as well. Grade: D-

ABC
ABC was riding its video levels on the hot side, and its feed appeared to have more of a green cast to the naked eye. It was also not quite as sharp as its competitors, and there were noticeable edge compression artifacts. Besides that, the compression was generally good, and the sound was about equal to the others. Grade: B-

HDNet
This was one fine-looking feed, and would have won this battle had there not been some sort of weird edge enhancement evident throughout the broadcast. It appeared that W's image had been cut out and placed over the background. The sound from HDNet was very good, though. Grade: B+

CBS
This feed gets the nod for the overall best-looking picture we received. There were a few visible compression artifacts, and the sharpness and contrast were slightly better than all the others. Plus, the sound was the most balanced and distortion-free of all the examples. Grade: A- The winner!

Except for that lame-looking feed from the local Fox station, all the HDTV pictures during the State of the Union address last night were good-to-excellent from our Midwest vantage point. If not viewed in rapid succession, it would have been extremely difficult to tell the difference between them.

It was a telling exercise nonetheless, where I found myself wishing for no compression artifacts at all. We can only hope for that in the not-too-distant future. – Charlie White

How about you, readers:

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