All movies are different, so it is hard to compare different movies, you also have that different films used and lens options can affect the final pic. For HD DVD there is also one other issue (that I brought up a bit over a year ago when BD launched and fanboys said BD looks bad compared to HD DVD based on a handful of movies made from bad old films) the BW is really too low, in the beginning with very few titles coming out the techs were taking a lot of time to make the encoding and tweaking them for quality. But as lossless audio is added (from Warner) and Universal trying to push out a lot more titles that limited BW is becoming ever more a determining factor on the quality.