Plug a set of bunny ears into the digital coax input, sit back and enjoy. At this time, unless you want to pay eleventy bajillion dollars a month for pay hdtv channels, you really shouldn't waste your money on an hdtv as your primamry tv. Even with the major networks, they only broadcast in hdtv for the prime time shows. everything else will just be digital (standard) which means about 80 percent of your tv shows will STILL be 4:3 ratio. Personally, I don't watch much tv, and when I do, it is either movies, or major network tv shows (Lost, Jericho, Heroes), so an hdtv would fit me perfectly. If you watch ALOT of regular tv, then hd sets will mostly suck.

As to the artifacts, that is what happens when you take a video source with 100,000 pixels of info and fit it to a display with 1,000,000 pixels (before nitpickers hit me up, these numbers are not accurate - just meant as example). Same reason high compression DIVX videos look like crap when blown up too big.