Well, I just got my Momitsu BDP-799 from XPCGear for $225 shipped. It took 11 days to get here from California. I set it up on my direct-view CRT (Samsung SlimFit) HDTV via HDMI and connected the digital audio coaxial output to my (very) old SONY receiver that decodes both Dolby Digital and DTS (but not much else). I popped in both my
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs BDs and was pretty impressed with the video quality of BD, in general, on my set. I have yet to do an A/B comparison with the DVDs of these two films, though (the DVDs were included with the BD releases). I then popped in my Japanese Region 2 DVD of
Kill Bill Vol. 1 and it played fine. I then played my Region 2 PAL DVD of
Hard Times and it played fine, too. So, apparently the player does a PAL-to-NTSC conversion and is DVD region-free out of the box. The upconversion of the Momitsu BDP-799 seems to my untrained eye at least as good (if not better) than my Oppo DV-970HD.
Deciding to tempt fate, I "upgraded" the firmware to the BDP-799_FW_ENG_091118.rar file (interestingly, the "Info" screen now says that the firmware is dated October 23, 2009, not November 18, 2009!). I now have a nag regarding not being hooked up to the internet after the firmware upgrade (it goes away after 30 seconds, though, so it really doesn't bother me). Once I hooked up an ethernet cable from my DSL modem, the message went away before the 30-second time period expired, so that's one way to never see the nag again. A potential problem that I have now after the firmware upgrade is that under the "Parental" menu, it asks for a 4-digit password, but I have no idea what it could be, since I never set one in the first place! I did notice that there are a couple of extra features with this firmware version like "Color Space" and "Color Depth" in the "Display" menu that weren't there with the previous firmware version (dated August 2009 IIRC).
Anyway, out of the box, it plays every disc I've thrown at it except RCE Region 1 DVDs... So, with no disc loaded in the player, I entered 875111 with my remote control and now RCE Region 1 DVDs play fine (875101 must have been the default set by either XPCGear or Momitsu).
I have no problems with the audio.
Snow White is encoded with DTS-HD Master Audio and
Harry Potter 6 is encoded with Dolby TrueHD, but the "core" data for both titles are bitstreamed to my (very) old receiver as just plain DTS 5.1 and Dolby Digital 5.1, both of which sound great to my ears!
The drive is a bit noisy, even when no disc is loaded in the player -- kind of a weird grinding sound. Oh, well. I can live with it as long as it's not harmful to the player, and by everything that I've read about the player,
everyone is experiencing this sound!
Finally, these are my A/V settings as of now. If you think that I should change any of them, I would appreciate your input and reasons as to why...
Display:
TV Type: NTSC <-- duh!
Resolution: HDMI Auto <-- outputs to 1080i for my particular set
TV Aspect: 16:9 Pillarbox <-- this allows 4:3 material to be properly pillarboxed instead of stretched out to fill the screen
Film Mode: On <-- don't know what this does!
Color Space: xvYCC <-- don't know what this does!
Color Depth: 36 Bit <-- don't know what this does!
Audio:
PCM Downsampling: 48kHz <-- don't know what this does!
Digital Output: Bitstream Legacy
Dynamic Range Control: Off
TLK
Oh, well.