Until a couple of weeks ago the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD had been a hotly contested one. HD DVD took the lead at the beginning by having lower unit prices over the Blu-ray players. However, that lead was quickly negated by Sony when they implemented the Blu-ray player in the new PlayStation 3 video game consoles. A lot of people were buying PlayStation 3 game consoles, which meant a lot of people had Blu-ray players.

For a while, the major releases were actually coming out in both formats. Mission: Impossible III was released on HD DVD and Blu-ray platforms. As far as M:I III the movie experience goes, Tom Cruise’s franchise weakens a little bit with this one. Although there is an interesting and exciting beginning, guaranteed by J.J. Abrams’s skillful scripting, the movie quickly devolves into a curious hybrid between an MI movie and Alias, the television spy series helmed by Abrams that starred Jennifer Garner. Abrams might have been trying to deepen the Ethan Hunt character, but that wasn’t what fans wanted. They wanted the action, the teamwork, the danger, and the spy toys.

Overall, the movie is good but isn’t quite Mission Impossible for too much of it. Also, we never found out what it was Ethan was supposed to steal for the bad guy. Although that wasn’t really important to the resolution of the film, it also wasn’t entirely fair to the audience. That’s a trait that Abrams exploited in his television spy series and it didn’t make many fans happy there either. We’re still seeing it in the television show Lost. Having said that, let's address the technical issues.

To explain the differences between the two formats, we first have to look at the commonality. Both formats utilize blue-violet laser readers. Normal DVDs are read in red laser. A single-layer DVD can hold up to 4.7GB of information. That means that movies compressed to fit on a single-layer DVD disc lose some of their quality – video as well as audio because both have to be compromised in order to make the fit. However, DVD was far better than the videotapes that were used previously.

Truth to be told, I didn’t notice any loss between theater presentation and home presentation. Movies, to me, looked different at the theater because the screens were bigger. I understood that taking a movie home and playing it on a 27-inch television was not going to give the same presentation as what I saw on the theater. I accepted that.

I didn’t even have surround sound at home for a long time. Then I started working with a company reviewing movies and started doing DVD reviews that required a better sound system. So I bought my first surround sound system. Of course, if the disc was not set up for surround sound properly (which many of them at the time weren’t), I couldn’t tell a difference.