Mine was made region free and it plays PAL discs fine. I had ordered a UK release of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (live on stage) and it plays flawless. The Oppo allows switching from 480i, 720p, 1080i and I noticed that the PAL disc is better at 480i and I let my Anthem reciever do the rest - if I set the Oppo at a higher level I do get a strange distortion on the bottom of the picture every once and while like a damaged video tape. This is probably due to the difference in speed of the PAL format. Also, my player is over a year old and only up converts to 1080i - the newer player is 1080p
I bit of advise, if purchasing the Oppo save your money and DON'T bother with the unit that has Faroudja chip - it can run into compatibility problems with many TVs causing pixelation. I ran into this years ago with the Denon units, most noticable on DLP TVs, but also on LCD. Oppo themselves told me to avoid it since I already know of the problem with Denon. I save some money and purchased the player without it and was amazed by the quality. I inquired Oppo if they plan to produce a Blu player and their response was NO. They would wait until the format proved itself and settled down to a single standard. Until then they would wait because they feel it is unstabel evolving. I don't blame them. With the constant line of patches to make a player work for every new disc release down the pipline it is an annoying way of doing business which I agree with Oppo as to why they have a wait and see point of view.
BTW - "CV" above me posted a problem in playing back a Japanese DVD - I would bet the probelem is with the DVD and not the Oppo since Japanese DVD are NTSC like North American DVDs unlike the UK PAL ones. Once the region is unlocked there shouldn't be a problem.
- Scott
