A comparison:

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/trainingday.html


Looks like HD-DVD is the clear winner.

This point made me chuckle:

Wasn't Blu-Ray supposed to be better because it has MORE capacity?

Good job, Sony.

I feel better about my leap on the HD-DVD bandwagon every single day. Now if the damn player would just get here....

Every day I am more and more tempted to take the plunge and buy the Toshiba.

I just wish it could be had in Canada for < $600.

The review also mentions that the BR version is darker and that the blacks fall away rapidly.

No doubt this is due to the BTW and WTW clipping of the Sony Mpeg Encoder, as documented on AVS Forum.

I just feel that Sony didn't give any serious consideration to the competing product (HD DVD) and really didn't care how the format looked. I'm only glad HD DVD was around to demonstrate what could actually be acheived.

Without HD DVD, we'd have been spoon-fed Mpeg2 for the next ten years.

I am very happy with my choice of the A1, and look forward to the TrueHD 5.1 firmware update (2.0) that's coming in two weeks (yay!)

Perhaps Sony decided that since competence did not win with Betamax, they should try incompetence. I can think of nothing else.

Why in the world stick with MPEG-2? I think they have repeatedly cut off their nose to spite their face in this battle.

Unfortunately Sony will do this kind of thing over and over. They stayed with Atrac3 when all wisdom told them people wanted MP3 support and did not see the light until they had lost nearly their entire portable music business to Apple and Creative.

Their other electronics not supporting SD when everyone else did also hurt them.

Sony is all about proprietary technology or at least technology they have a hand in like MPEG-2. However, them not at least supporting H.264 is baffling since they used in on their PSP movies. Very bizarre and short sighted company.

By all accounts, they will be supporting a new version of H.264 (developed by either Panasonic or Philips, can't remember which), that is supposed to look a lot better than the current codec. Time will tell.