American DVD Players

[Rogue[WP]]

Hey DVD people,

I have an opportunity to buy an American DVD player for use here in the UK, aside from the obvious voltage difference problems can anyone else see any problems ? I have heard there are differences between US, UK and Jap disks but I can always import them for it. I await your replies.

Rogue

[Still Abaddon]

You could well be wasting your money.

As you mention there will be the voltage difference but chances are it'll be region locked for region 1 too. This isn't as bad as a region 2 locked player ie one bought over here, but you won't be able to pop down to any local shops and buy discs for it. All your discs will need to be bought mail order or via other means making impulse buys out of the question.

Course you could probably get it hacked to be multi region but if you're gonna do that you may as well buy a multi region player to start with.....

Then you've got warranty problems. It prolly won't go wrong but.......

So on top of buying a transformer you're making life difficult for yourself....Basically it'd need to be cheap.

[Rogue[WP]]

so you reckon there would be no scart compatibility problems or anything like that ? My old man works/lives out there so I can get him to bring loadsa discs back and they are really cheap out there ! the players are like 90 quid.

[Still Abaddon]

As long as your TV is modern and can accept NTSC inputs (we use PAL) or SVHS or best of all RGB then you should be fine.

Worst case is your TV doesn't take NTSC and your DVD player puts out nothing but, then the best you could probably do would be a b/w picture, if any at all.

Hopefully the dvd player would put out an S-VHS or RGB signal and your TV can accept them. In that case TV standards make no difference since RGB is RGB the world over....

Basically it depends on the DVD player and your TV.

Oh yeah and if you do buy one make sure you remember I've been helpful when yer dad's bringing discs back :wink:

[DeKurver]

The main advantage of R2 players is that they have to be capable of both NTSC and PAL playback since Japan (NTSC) is also R2. If you buy a R1 player you will be unable to play PAL R2 discs. If you're certain that you will only buy R1 discs then it makes no difference. This shouldn't be a problem if you only want films, but some television series (e.g. Black Adder) might not be available in R1.

R2 players are more expensive at the moment, but IMHO they are more flexible due to the PAL/NTSC playback requirement.