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  1. dcaconnolly

    Region-Free player?

    Rick, The Malata is fine if you are trying to play PAL discs into an NTSC-only TV, but outside the US most TVs take both PAL and NTSC inputs so the PAL-NTSC conversion is unnecessary. The moral seems to be, never export an American TV! Another option to the Malata is to go to Australia via...
  2. dcaconnolly

    Widescreen TVs - the state of things

    Greg, It's interesting that in the UK almost every set on sale is now widescreen, since the broadcasters started transmitting that a year or two ago. Here in HK we had a few widescreen sets on sale a few years ago but they have disappeared because we have no widescreen broadcasts. So now the...
  3. dcaconnolly

    Region 1 RCE discs

    Malcolm, Jet Li/The One has been available in Region 3 for a few weeks. So if the R1 version has RCE, go for the R3!
  4. dcaconnolly

    Region 1 RCE discs

    Jeff, All the players here have the Region 3 mark on the back, as they should have. But chipping in hardware/firmware seems to have given way to commands on the remote, so when you buy a machine here you will find that it has already been 'all-coded'. Indeed, if the packaging HASN'T been...
  5. dcaconnolly

    Region 1 RCE discs

    Ted, I'm not sure about the UK, but you can now buy machines here in Hong Kong which will play all codes including RCE without any remote hacking, including mainstream brands such as Pioneer and Sony. Because we sit in the middle of Regions 1 and 3 (and 6), everything here is all code. It's...
  6. dcaconnolly

    Region 1 RCE discs

    Since America's Sweethearts and A Knight's Tale, I haven't come across any Region 1 RCE discs (mainly Colombia Tristar) which won't play on old all-code players but which the new Asian all-code players can handle. Have Columbia finally given up this RCE nonsense, which just stops them selling...
  7. dcaconnolly

    Non-region 0/1 DVDs - mainly PAL?

    Just to add to what Jeff says, as far as I know ALL Region 3 DVD are NTSC. This covers much more than Hong Kong, including Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand and so on. But just to underline a point I have made before, all DVD players around here play all-codes and both PAL and NTSC, as do...
  8. dcaconnolly

    Advice on a Plasma?

    Jeff, I just bought a Fujitsu PDS 4229 W which seemed to be a special offer, since it sold at $5100. It is much better than the others around this price, particularly contrast and crispness. It has AV, S-Video, component and RS 232C inputs. I am very happy with the result. Later I found that...
  9. dcaconnolly

    U.K. DVD format

    I agree with Jeff's point that most people don't know or care about PAL capability in the US - the same is true for NTSC capability in the UK. But that doesn't necessarily mean that PAL doesn't exist in any US TV sets. I bought a Sony Wega in the UK last year, from a Sony shop. I asked for...
  10. dcaconnolly

    DVD Region X for PS2 ???

    Just a comment from somewhere outside R1 where all players are all-code, and where we don't have a problem with PAL conversion because all TVs show both NTSC and PAL. The current hottest DVD player in Hong Kong is the Pioneer DV 533K which for under $300 will play all codes plus music files on...
  11. dcaconnolly

    Warner Australia churning out MORE NTSC DVDs to the Australien PAL DVD Market!

    Maybe a reason for putting out NTSC R4 discs is that Region 4 actually covers South America as well? I'm not sure which countries in S. America use NTSC, but surely some do. Which leads to an interesting question. I just purchased an R4 version of The Gift in Australia,which has subtitles in...
  12. dcaconnolly

    Australians fighting region coding

    It is correct that almost all DVD players in Hong Kong are sold as all-code machines,and that the major stores sell Region 1 and 2 discs as well as Region 3 (Asia). But the main market is for R3 discs, because they have Chinese subtitles, and the R1/R2 discs just fill in the gaps where the local...
  13. dcaconnolly

    Enhanced Regional Coding

    Andrew, Thanks for your comments and support. Actually I have no problem with Regional coding, because it's a sensible way to deal with the massive number of subtitled languages worldwide. What I am concerned about is the new RCE 'feature' that Columbia are using on a few R1 titles, and which...
  14. dcaconnolly

    Enhanced Regional Coding

    Just a moment - the studios should get essentially the same income from an R3 disc as an R1 disc, so it's the distributors who MIGHT be upset, not the studios. In the case of Crouching Tiger it was released on R3 very early, while still playing in the theatres, which was a surprise to me. But...
  15. dcaconnolly

    Enhanced Regional Coding

    Outside the US/Canada there is a significant but small demand for R1 DVD. They are often (but by no means always) available slightly earlier than the local versions (in my case R3) but for the mass market in Asia they will never be popular because of the lack of Asian script subtitles. So why...
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