"Century of Japanese Cinema" and their Region coding
 

Hello,

I've been looking to pick up a bunch of the titles on the Panorama sublabel,
"A Century of Japanese Cinema".

I've noticed for a while now, that many titles listed as being "Region 3" on yesasia.com are listed as "Region Free" on dvdasian, and "fullhouseDVD" on ebay; but not all of them.
I know this doesn't matter to most people because of region free dvd players, but i work at a video store, and not all of our clientel have them, so i have to make sure i'm renting out region 1 or region free stock.

Does anyone know of a rule of thumb? Is there a certain date, which before, they are indeed region free and after not...?

titles such as, Castle of Sand, and Night in Fog in Japan, are good examples where the 2 sites differ in opinion. where as "Learning Circle" for example is listed as Region 3 on both yesasia and dvdasian.

It seems most of their new HK releases are all region free despite saying region 3.

definately confusing.

thanks in advance!

I haven't used them in awhile, but I remember DVDAsian being pretty good about listing whether a disc was R3 or R0, or in the case of some Korean DVDs, R3 -and- R1.
Most HK discs are supposed to be R3, but if DVDAsian lists it as R0, it probably is region free....I would email them about a specific title and see if they can tell you for sure....

Not to state the obvious, but region free players are pretty cheap nowadays....I got my Philips 642 at Walmart for $60. If you can afford it, it would save a lot of hassle....

He did say it was for costumers renting videos where he works. He might not want to buy a $60 player for all his costumers.

these people wear costumes to the video store?

I have a bunch of them including the aforementioned GAKKO 2, as well as just about all the other avaialble Yamada Yojis and many others. I seem to recall from looking at the packaging that many of them were R3. I think 24EYES was R0. I'm pretty sure all the TORA-SANs were R3.

When I get home I'll look. I'll also try them out on my R1 player and see if they are definitely R3s.

-goro-