Warner Home Video provides first HD DVD vs Blu-ray comparison

We hate to up the pundit wars, but we aren't the ones that released the same titles on both Blu-ray and HD DVD -- Warner Home Video did. Thanks to them though, the two high-def camps can now size up their formats mano-a-mano via Training Day, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Rumor Has It. HighDefDigest took the 1080i Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player along with the noisy 1080p Samsung BDP-1000 Blu-ray player and hooked 'em up to their HP Pavilion reference HDTV via HDMI. All three titles suffered from similar issues of extra noise on the Blu-ray side, and appeared just a tad darker then their HD DVD counterparts. An issue with cropping also popped up that we highly doubt anyone would notice unless they too have both players side by side, but the reviewers noticed less of a picture on all three Blu-ray titles even though they shared the same advertised aspect ratios as the HD DVDs. This brings up the question however, if this cropping is caused by the Blu-ray format, three bad Blu-ray masters, or the Samsung player? We are willing to bet on the latter most of the three, but we won't be able to find out until Pioneer or Panasonic releases their first Blu-ray players somtime in the next few months. No matter how you spin it, the HD DVD fanboys have something to celebrate as they walked away from this first scuffle without so much as a bloody nose.