I live in the US and am looking to buy a NTSC/PAL DVD player. Does anyone here have any experience with these players? Any problems? Any strings attached with these players? And do these players play discs from all regions? I’m looking to play Asian films but some from Europe as well.
I live in the UK and I have a dual-format, multi-region DVD player, however, it is my understanding that in order to play both PAL and NTSC format media, the TV also has to be able to handle both formats. As far as I know, the DVD player doesn’t re-render (in my case)NTSC as PAL, it just works with both and outputs the appropriate signal, which the TV will display if it is capable of doing so.
I don’t know if this is universally the case, but it is certainly the impression with which I am left from reading the technical spec of my equipment.
My el-cheapo DVD player (Norcent DP300, $70 a couple years ago) is supposed to be able to convert PAL discs to NTSC and vice versa. It has three selectable output modes: NTSC, PAL, and Auto - NTSC for NTSC discs, PAL for PAL discs. I don’t have any PAL discs, though, so I haven’t been able to see it work first-hand.
It’s not region-free out of the box, but it does have a region-free hack that involves pushing a few buttons on the remote.
I just bought one a month or so ago to play some on my PAL DVDs. I paid $130 for it, though off the top of my head I don’t remember the site. Mine is a JVC and does convert the PAL so I can watch it on my US TV. So far I haven’t had any problems, the biggest is that some times, I’ve seen it two or three times, you will notice about a second skip. Other then that the player has been fine. I’ve only played PAL discs in it so far, but it’s supposed to play all regions, I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
If you want to email me I can probably find the place I ordered it on-line from. The DVD came pretty quick.
Just to make it absolutely clear, region encoding and TV format are completely separate issues - a multi-region DVD player will not necessarily play all TV formats and a multi-format player may be region-specific (although the tendency in modern players is that they all do everything - I suppose it’s easier to manufacture one device that can be made to work everywhere)
I have the Philips DVP642 and it’s amazing. I bought it because it will play Divx files burned to dvds, but it’s region-free, converts PAL DVD’s on the fly, VCD, SVCD. The thing is awesome. Costs around $75 as well
I have the Daewoo 5900, which I picked up at Sam’s Club for about $60. It displays weird glitches every now and then: it can’t play home-burned DVD-Rs correctly, for example. But it can be set to region-free play easily, the NTSC/PAL converter is built in, and the disks play flawlessly.
Friends of mine recently bought a DVD player that is region-free, and that plays PAL and NTSC. We were watching some Australian (PAL) DVDs on it last week (hooked up to a regular NTSC TV), and the only problem i noticed was an occasional, almost imperceptible shudder or skip in the picture. It only happened a few times in two hours, and it certainly didn’t interfere with my viewing pleasure.
I can’t remember what brand they had, but i know they paid well under $100 for it.
I live in the UK. I went to a chain called Richer Sounds and told them I needed a DVD player that would play DVDs from any region, and whether PAL or NTSC. They had several, and I just chose the next-to-cheapest. It has worked perfectly ever since, and with no problems I’m aware of. They have web presence, and will happily ship machines anywhere in the world (and I have NO commercial interest here).
Be clear on a few potentially confusing points:
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being able to play DVDs from any and all regions is one feature; being able to play PAL or NTSC DVDs is another. You want both.
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Your TV set’s capabilities may also be an issue. For example, suppose you are here in the UK where the ‘norm’ is for a DVD player to pass a PAL signal to a TV set that displays a PAL picture. If you want to play an NTSC source, in some cases the DVD player does all the conversion work, so that the TV set still regards it as a normal PAL signal. In some other cases, the DVD player only correctly decodes the NTSC signal but doesn’t convert it to PAL, so the TV set needs to understand how to display an NTSC signal. So if your TV can understand both types of signal, no worries. If not, you may need a DVD player that doesn’t just interpret PAL and NTSC, but also provides whatever conversion your TV set needs.
This might be a bigger problem in the US than in the UK. You see, the DVD player doesn’t quite convert the NTSC signal to PAL, it converts it to a hybrid called PAL-60 that most modern PAL TV sets can display. That is to say, it is capable of converting the colour coding and the sound frequency offset, but not the scan frequency. So it’s still at 60 Hz.
Now, the reverse would be a standard called NTSC-50, suitable for display on US TVs. I strongly suspect this is far less common, as it is generally much harder to find inter-standard compatibility in the US than in Europe. You may well have to buy a multi-standard TV as well as a multi-standard DVD player.