I'm in the US, but am from the UK. I'm looking for name-brand players which can play both UK and US discs on UK and US TVs.

Any advice?

Thanks to the Search feature here, I'm steering clear of Sampo, but I'm not sure where to go from here.

I don't know much about this area but DVD Talk has a separate forum for International DVD and Movies. It also covers multiregion and region free players. Several hardware threads there that might help.

The problem you're going to run into is PAL to NTSC conversion. A lot of TVs in Europe are capabale of displaying both standards, and if you have one of those you can find a name-brand multi-region player fairly easily.

But in the U.S. multi-standard TVs are rare. You could still get a modified name-brand player, but you'll need an outboard PAL to NTSC converter. These tend to be pretty expensive ($500 to $700).

A lot of people have had good things to say about the new Malata DVD player, which you can find at www.avdeals.com . It's reagion-selectable, does PAL to NTSC conversion very well, and is progressive.

There are two versions of the player. I think the more expensive one allows the owner to upgrade firmware by downloading the firmware from the Internet and burning it to a CD-R.

there are a ton of solutions for multiregion players out there ($100 oritron from target) however when you start talking about europe and pal thats when it gets tricky. The apex's do a basic PAL to NTSC conversion but it ofter messes the aspect ratio up. That one Mr Salty recommend i hear is good since it has a fine tune you can adjust the aspect ratio if i understand how it works correctly you can fix any errors that may occur during the converstion.