Plato-
Depending upon where you live, you might still want to keep an eye open for an OTA HD tuner. The CATV box you get gets the HD feed from the cable, not OTA, so you are limited to what Comcast decides to use its bandwidth to carry. While Comcast in my area has a pretty decent line up, there are a host of local stations I can pick up OTA that broadcast in HD. Try plugging your coordinates into www.antennaweb.com (I think, maybe its a .net--if its neither, run a search on antennaweb). They will tell you the on air status, format, distance, and direction to the HD broadcasts in your area, and what class of antenna you would need to pick them up.
I tried HD over DirecTV, but I personally thought it sucked. Channel changing speeds on DirecTV are awful, no matter what box you get, because it has to switch odd/even channels on the LNB and receive a full frame before you see anything. All of the CATV companies I've ever heard of charge nominal monthly rentals and I've never heard of anyone like dglinn's friend and the way they got socked. I wonder if it was a third party installer or whether it was some oddball deal where they were effectively offering to install an OTA HD box. Seems odd.
In any event, go HD, you will not regret it. I gather there may be a new satellite broadcaster (I want to say Zoom?) that will offer nothing but HD, I think twenty some channels. I keep meaning to check into that...
Eric
