I've recently purchased a PIONEER DV-363 region-free player and watched my first R2 disc. I noticed the playback had a VERY slight "Max Headroom" quality about it, like it was missing occasional frames or something. Its not really terrible, but sometimes distracting now that I've noticed it. Is this a normal problem with PAL to NTSC conversions? Can anything be done to correct it?

Well, PAL is 25 FPS so maybe that could have something to do with it.

Some cheap players just drop the frame #25 every second, which can be very annoying.

High-end players do a variety of different conversions, but usually just slow down so every frame is played, but at a slightly slower speed. This effects the audio though (some players can fix that also, but not many).

Nick