Black and White Playback Issues

[jepps]

Hello there,

I have recently moved to Japan and have a sony DVP-NS780V stand alone player with me. This player is region free and is NTSC and PAL compatable.

The problem is that when i play any of my Australian DVD's the picture still plays in black and white. I have changed the output of the player to NTSC and it still plays in B+W.

When the player is first turned on the welcome/home screen is also B+W. This says to me that the TV has issues with a PAL signal, however like i mentioned before when i change the output to NTSC for playback it still shows in B+W - strange, or am i missing something.

I suspect that it is a TV issue, its a Panasonic TH-21EA1H, searching this in google only pops up with 2 links, both in Japanese, both talking about remote controls (translated by google) so there is no help there.

Overview:

Player: NTSC/PAL changable, factory region free (bought in Australia)
Discs: Regions 1, 4, 0 or burnt
NTSC Discs: Plays fine (in colour) with any setting in player menu ie Auto/PAL/NTSC
PAL Discs: Plays only in B+W and letterbox function only puts black bar accross top of screen
Connections: Via S-Video & RCA, no changes to above.

Any ideas folks?

Cheers
Jepps

PS Is it possible to buy a region free player in Japan out of the box, ie Pioneer etc so i can play my Aus/US disks or is JP still only selling in players coded region 2?

[guns1inger]

The question I would ask is "Does it output true NTSC ?". Not all players do true format conversion. Some convert NTSC to pseudo-PAL - PAL resolution at 60 fields per second - and pull similar tricks when converting PAL to NTSC. Personally, I think Sony are one of the worst for format conversion in DVD players.

I believe that your player probably plays outputs PAL for PAL, NTSC for NTSC, and some form of PAL hybrid when doing format conversion from PAL to NTSC.