Last night I rented Speed Racer in HD from Time Warner’s Movies on Demand service. In simple terms, it’s unwatchable. Since Speed Racer was made to look like a cartoon, it has a limited color palette. This coupled with fast action sequences creates compression artifacts so noticeable that the “HD” version of the movie I rented becomes so distorted I can’t watch it. It’s just too annoying. The details I should be enjoying for the tracks and cars are totally distorted thanks to Time Warner’s over-compression of their HD content for streaming. Time Warner, you’ve really got to step it up if you really want to play in the HD sandbox. I’m starting to wonder if satellite’s any better…