My new Sony DVP-NS76H DVD player is looking good so far. I made a slight mistake in my last post. I am using a component video cable, not the inferior composite. The picture is rock solid. I tried some old Divx films I have on CD and those played perfectly, apart from me needing to manually adjust the TV aspect ratio to make them fill the screen. For audio I'm still using half of a free stereo cable to carry the digital signal to my Yamaha amp and it sounds fine.

Today I made it multi-region. Most of the mentions of this on places like AV Forums said to use a OneForAll remote, but I couldn't get mine to do it. It seems you cannot just use the standard Sony unit. So I tried an alternative of using the demo version of OmniRemote with a special configuration on my Palm. A few screen taps later I was playing my region 1 (Canadian) Harry Potter with no problems.

Things are less good on the Powerball front. Mine is suffering a problem where the screen locks up, so it's going back to John Lewis. For reference it's sold under the name 'Strength Ball'. I've now played with an original Powerball and there is a significant difference. The Powerball is much smoother in operation. It also has more functions on the display, so I think it's worth the extra few pounds. Both are made in China/Taiwan, possibly in the same factory, but maybe one gets more attention.