I recently picked up the Daewoo 5800 as a backup to my old Apex, and noticed something odd about the playback of Ring, the Tartan R0 PAL release. On my computer with a DVD-ROM, it plays back in widescreen mode, but on the Daewoo (and Apex for that matter) it plays full-frame. Is this because the conversion on the cheap players isn't done properly, or is there some setting that needs to be made to get it to play correctly? My other R3 discs (like Battle Royale) play widescreen just fine on the Daewoo. Thanks.

Unfortunately that's exactly the case. I had the same problems with an Apex player. The only chipset that can convert PAL correctly is the Mediamatics chipset found in the Malata (and some other players). The Apex (and Daewoo) will stretch the picture.

An XBox will convert the PAL signal correctly so the R0 PAL releases of Ring and Ring 2 will appear in widescreen. I have a Malata and the XBox seemed to do a better job with these than it did. Ring Zero is a Region 2 DVD, so it won't play in an XBox... that's okay though cuz Ring 0 sucked.