Here at HEXUS, we’re always crawling the curbs of the Interweb looking for choice titbits. The other day we happened upon a rather interesting discovery about those high-definition optical formats we’re still waiting for (im)patiently in the UK.

Projector Central (a site for people who really, really, really like AV projectors) recently put HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc copies of three movies released in both formats side by side, using Optoma’s awesome HD7100 home cinema projector. The HD-DVD versions beat Blu-ray hands down.

According to Projector Central (and we’ve seen this news bubbling under elsewhere for months), Blu-ray has been having problems with manufacturing and the first movies to be released use only a single 25GB layer. But HD-DVDs are using two 15GB layers, so have an extra 5GB.

This makes all the difference, since MPEG-2 encoding is being used in both cases, with Blu-ray Disc movies having to employ higher compression - and it's showing. If you consider that regular video at 720 x 576 requires around 8GB for a two-hour movie, then high definition at 1,920 x 1,080, which has five times the resolution, requires five times as much space – or 40GB - if using the same kind and level of compression.

So it’s not hard to see why Blu-ray is encountering problems by trying to fit HD movies onto 25GB discs and why HD-DVD, with 5GB more to play with, has fewer issues.

HD-DVD has always been claimed to be technologically inferior to Blu-ray. HD-DVD is thought to be held back by its need for backwards compatibility with regular DVDs. And, whereas HD-DVD offers only 15GB on each of its two layers, Blu-ray stores 25GB per layer. But that’s no benefit if the second layer can’t be used.

The huge price premium of Blu-ray players over HD-DVD has been widely criticised, although Blu-ray’s proponents say you’ll be getting premium features such as 1080p. But if what you’re getting in return isn’t actually better, then it’s an even worse deal. So this is definitely round one to the cheaper HD-DVD underdog.