I've never experienced this one with a R1 DVD release before...

I recently rented a new film called When Night Falls on DVD. I attempted to play it on my standard Sony DVD Player, and encountered an "Area Limitation" error, which seemed odd.

I then popped it in my Philips DVD player which is region-free, and can also convert PAL signals, and it played just fine. So that got me curious...

The back cover and the top of the DVD label both clearly state "Region 1 NTSC"

I popped the disc in my computer, and PowerDVD tells me the disc is Region Free, but... it's actually PAL format. That explains why it gave my Sony player the error.

This is very strange, since its an official DVD release marketed in North America and sold at Amazon and most other major retailers.

Now unless I received some total rental fluke of some kind, I'd say this studio will be getting some returns!
It's marketed by E1 Entertainment who aren't exactly newcomers to the DVD market.

Has anyone else ever experienced something similar with a R1 disc?

Wow, this is a new one to me. I've seen R2 NTSC and R0 PAL, but never R1 PAL.
Of course until going blu in August, I'd been region free for the last 5 years anyway so even if I happened to have a disc like this, I'd probably never noitce.

The DVD appears to be R0 PAL, but has been mis-labelled. Producing an actual R1 PAL disc makes no sense at all.
R2 NTSC discs do exist, and not only for Japan or multi-region. They often go unnoticed, since most PAL equipment plays NTSC just fine.

Quoting Forget_the_Rest:

Quote:
All PAL equipment I've bought in the last 10-15 years supports NTSC but a US Blu-ray player I bought two years ago doesn't support PAL.

Definitely! The majority of DVD & Blu-ray players sold in the United States don't support PAL. I'm not aware of any R1 Sony players (except hardware modified) that can handle PAL playback/conversion for instance.

There are a few that can decode PAL of course, but they're in the minority of the players on the market here. And those often require a region hack (i.e. Philips) to play any PAL discs which aren't coded for all region playback.