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Actually upscaling players sell well because their most all of whats out there. In Best Buy, even if they don't have HDTVs, customers rarly buy the 2 non upcon players we have, because they plan to upgrade to HD in the near future. It's actually hard to buy a non HD set these days, the few tube TVs BB has left are just left over inventory. Plus the clever wording of the digital change over next year, has 90% of the people sure that they'll need an HDTV to keep watching TV.
At this point, those who don't have HDTVs are people with still functioning tubes, and when those fail, their gonna upgrade. I'd fully expect 90% of households to be HDTV owners by 2012. All that said, I think Blu Ray has a steeper hill to climb than DVD did, and it will be quite some time before we see BD sales overtake DVD. It really can't be very accuratly compared to laserdisc however, the sales on players have brought them cheaper than any laserdisc player ever was new, and we're not paying $50+ for every single title.
DVD overtook VHS as fast as it did, not because of the resolution per se, but because DVD was a digital format, thus little to no noise. VHS had a LOT of video noise, and is what actually made it look so bad. Add to that, movies on a compact disc attracted alot of people. Blu Ray doesn't have "the completley different" thing going for it. Whats sad to me, is that the audio is every bit as much an upgrade if not more so than the PQ, but most people have HTIB's and won't notice that. Expensive audio systems are a hard sell to Americans, as their typically so short sighted.
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