Panasonic DVD-A300MU foreign market player...

[Red October]

Just came in the mail today via Canada Post, this very old Panasonic player, it dates to 1996, close to the inception of DVD as a consumer format and before the DVD Forum replaced the DVD Consortium. My example I believe was de-regioned, although nowhere does it mention "Region" codes, it refers to "Locales" and was for "Locale 6"... if these are the same as the "region" codes it was made to play movies in Red China! Everything was included, box and even the original plastics; the receipt is from an establishment in Taiwan and in 1996 the unit cost $1,800! (I doubt this price is expressed in Taiwanese dollars as they are worth very little). It seems to be a very nice unit indeed and I am very pleased with it as I have sought a name-brand region-free unit for a very long time.

[dr.ido]

I regret not picking up a Toshiba SD-3000 when I had the chance. I knew it was an early model, but at the time I didn't know if was Toshiba first DVD player (Panasonics was the DVD-A100).

I did pick up a Pioneer DVL-L DVD/Laserdisc combo unit though. As a DVD player it is completely useless here (PAL/Region 4). There may be a modification out there for it, but as is I can't even get it to play region free discs.

[Red October]

That's strange. As I understand it since the video on the DVD is itself free of any standard like NTSC or PAL a DVD player should in theory play whatever it is told to by the disc; since you are in AU and use PAL I wonder if the disc is the problem; the disc might be telling the player to output NTSC; do you get any audio? What does the player output natively? There might be a way to de-region it and there might not, I had a nice Marantz that as far as I could tell could not be de-regioned, nor can my two Panasonics (two identical units; I forget the model number, I'll look in the morning... or after I sleep... or something.) It's 5:15 AM here and I'm going to bed.

[dr.ido]

DVDs are not only region coded, they are also coded for PAL or NTSC. Some regions include both PAL and NTSC countries. PAL discs can be encoded at a slightly higher resolution than NTSC (720x480 for 525 line NTSC, 720x576 for 625 line PAL).

Most DVD players available here will play both PAL and NTSC discs. Some players will play all discs in PAL, some will output whatever is encoded on the disc. Most TVs/monitors sold here over the last 15 or so years are multisystem and will correctly display both PAL and NTSC (though older TVs are usually PAL only).

The DVL-9 will only output NTSC (which I can display). NTSC Laserdiscs play fine, VCDs encoded at NTSC resolution play fine. All the DVDs I've tried so far just give me error messages (which are in Japanese, so I can't read them).

Since I last tried it I may have gotten some discs that it will play, but it's not part of my main system so I haven't tried yet.

I have a couple of Sony monitors similar to yours (the Euro models look the same, but are full PAL/NTSC/SECAM multisystem and have SCART RGB inputs) that I use as my main TVs. I'm watching the 21" version connected to a DVB set top box via RGB right now. I used to have the PAL version of that JVC VCR too, but I got rid of it when it needed new heads.

[Red October]

Those "Sony Design" monitors are great! Best picture I've ever seen on anything but true hi-def tube sets; I'm not sure what their maximal resolution is but I'm sure it very high as it has an RGB computer input on the back of it. They are however VERY heavy (about 100lbs a piece!) So I see about your problem; I have no idea why the player wouldn't be outputting NTSC but it might be made to reject PAL discs unilaterally. I'm not sure why they'd do that.