[harpsichord]

Many of us here in NTSC land have issues at times playing PAL DVD's, and there are a LOT of them here. The solution is often to buy a cheapo dvd player to handle them, which I did for many years. But when my Apex dvd player started getting hinky I went looking for a reasonably priced unit that might handle all my discs, including Blu-Ray. There are a couple Blu-Ray players that will do this, but many are pretty pricey. There are also a few sites that offer Blu-Ray players that have been altered to handle PAL dvd's, like these two:

http://www.world-import.com/region_f...VD_players.htm

http://www.regioncodefreedvd.com/Reg...d_players.html

(Note - They are also concerned with region-free playback, which is rarely an issue here but some of you may run into this as well)

Anyway, someone at a forum I belong to pointed me to a Woot sale on New Year's Day, and I snagged a Sherwood BDP 5004 Blu-Ray player (http://www.amazon.com/Sherwood-BDP-5...4944502&sr=8-1) that really fits the bill. I've had it a few days now and, besides Blu-Rays it has played NTSC DVD+ -R/+ -RW, PAL DVD+ -R/+ -RW, avi cd's, jpeg cd's, mp3 cd's and audio cd/cdr/cdrw's. It's billed as Region-Free, which I haven't been able to test, but I understand a firmware update can fubar that function, so I can't speak to that.

I just thought I'd mention this unit, in case anyone was interested. I've seen some odd comments about it, but so far I'm very happy with it. It loads Blu-Rays pretty briskly IMO, which seems to be a common complaint for many other reasonably-priced units. You might want to check it out.