THE high-definition revolution is rolling into 2008, changing the way we think about everything from TVs to PCs.

Just about every brand is clamouring to hop aboard the HD bandwagon.

Panasonic, Sony, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, LG, Bush, Toshiba, TEAC, Marantz and Denon are all designing, building and releasing high-definition products.

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Forget analog -- that's ancient technology -- and while you're at it you might want to give standard-definition digital appliances a big swerve, too. They're also on the way out.

Everything we know is going high definition, including camcorders, DVD movies, PCs, notebooks and especially the family TV.

High-definition promises and largely delivers picture and sound quality vastly superior to DVD and analog TV programs.

High-definition pictures have the level of picture detail and spread of colours previously seen only in a modern cinema.

But high definition isn't just about dazzling amounts of picture detail and multi-channel surround sound.

It's also about greater storage capacity and speed. DVDs store up to 4.7GB of data per layer, with the most the format can handle being about 17GB on a double-sided, double-layered disc.

A double-layered, single-sided Blu-ray disc can hold up to 50GB of data. That's enough to store four full-length Hollywood movies and still have room for a feast of extra features.

But instead of just stuffing more of the same quality videos on to the disc, this extra capacity is used to deliver far more digital information to greatly improve the sound and vision.

Obviously the hardware -- ranging from Blu-ray players to the latest TVs and PCs -- has to crunch through this massive amount of information at lightning speeds.

And it does, thanks to a new generation of built-in, compact and super-fast micro-computers.

Industry experts predict 2008 will be the year Australians join the high-definition revolution.

Australians will buy about a million plasma and LCD TVs this financial year. Many will be high-definition models.

Within 18 months, most sets with screens larger than 32 inches will be high-definition models with built-in high-definition tuners.

Pioneer no longer builds standard-definition plasma screens.

"Our range of plasmas are premium products designed for a high-definition market, which means Blu-ray and the best HD digital TV programs. We simply don't intend to build standard-definition models," Pioneer's marketing analyst Michael Broadhurst says.

Research by GfK marketing shows the high-definition market doubling in growth, with non-HD products in decline and dropping 42 per cent in sales compared with the same time last year.

Australians also poured 89 per cent of total spending on HD appliances on high-definition plasmas and LCD TVs.

Other research by GfK shows Australians generally aren't bleeding-edge "early adopters" by nature; as technology consumers we only make the leap if the price is right and a product delivers practical advantages.

So why are Australians taking to high-definition products so readily?

Perhaps it's because we've learnt the advantages of accepting so many other changes over the years; from black-and-white TV to colour, from AM to FM radio, and then -- the crucial moment when the digital revolution entered our lives -- CDs killed vinyl records. The little silver disc arrived in the mid-80s and it wasn't long before it smashed the LP.

Encouraged by its success, the brands and movie studios moved to phase out analog video and launched DVD in the '90s. It went on to replace tape and the VCR in what now seems like the blink of an eye.

It wasn't long before the digital-optical disc appeared everywhere.

Computers lost their low-capacity, slow floppy drives and replaced them with DVD burners.

Camcorders jettisoned the cassette and moved to DVD disc and later to hard-drive and flash-memory cards.

And the VCR became the DVD player, DVD recorder or personal video recorder equipped with a hard drive.

The analog tube TV seemed safe from planned obsolescence until the new Australian digital TV system was rolled out on January 1, 2001.

From then it was only a matter of time before the analog tube TV was buried by plasma and LCD sets.

Initially all the talk was about standard-definition digital TV.

But in a move to convince viewers to migrate from analog to digital TV, networks 10, Seven and Nine each announced a new high-definition channel for this year.

The new range of programs are not available on analog or standard-definition channels.

And to ensure that we all get the message, new Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has announced the analog TV system will be switched off by 2013.

This may or may not be an ambit claim.

But one thing is crystal clear -- 2008 belongs to HD.

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