Well I recently watch a PAL disc not region 1 DVD, on my newer Zenith DVB-318, I had to search on how to do the region thing, but it worked flawlessly. The are $160 on the better deals out there though. But on the plus side, you may get a kick out of DVD scaled to 1080i. I like the player alot.
I'm not sure what region it was though, as I barrowed it. The title was "Little Sister".. Not to bad a movie really all in all.
It involved me going into a menu and setting the region as "0" to play it. The next movie played, it had reset back to region 1 though, so maybe a little pita factor there for sure if you watch a lot of non region 1 discs.
Oh geeesh Pill... Those players are in high demand here in the U.S. one of the few solutions out there that allow 1080i out the component video ports, and it is reported that feature is gone on the most current build of the player, so they are sort of fly'n off the shelves right now at the webtailers.
A few on here, have said they may be looking to sell their's though. I wish I had better news for you on it.
If you stretch your budget, the Cambridge Audio 540D is region-free right out of the box. No hacks necessary. And it converts NTSC to PAL and vice versa almost flawlessly (said to do it in prog scan as well, but I don't have a TV capable of testing that). It retails for 389$US.
A better DVD player solution for converting PAL to NTSC is the Yamakawa 288K/VGA, which produces a much better image than the Toshiba SD4900 (I own both and have compared). You can get them at either www.YamakawaDVD.com or www.ecost.com (search for Yamakawa). Cost is under $60 at either place. They are well-built for the money and have lots of user settings to control the sound and video quality. They are also easily made region-free.