Jessica,
I just bought my first region-free BRD player. A SONY, for $149 on Amazon. I have not yet tried any BRD's on it, but I did try a DVD that is Region 2 PAL and it plays just fine
(Note: someone once told me that all BRD players will play DVDs from any region - even a Region A BRD player would play a Region 2 DVD, but it may be unable to play PAL DVD's. I have no idea if that is true. The same person also told me that even Region-Free BRD players may be unable to play PAL DVD's. Again, I have no idea if that is true.
All I know is, I bought this player
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01D915UC4/ref=ya_aw_oh_bia_dp?ie=UTF8&psc=1And I tried this one PAL DVD and it worked fine.
I have not yet tried any BRD's on it but I am sure it'll be fine.
At that link you will see various options, like for the $149 you'll get a player with wired internet connection, or for $179 with wi-fi, etc.
I took the cheaper one because A) I have an ethernet cable available if I want to connect it, and, more importantly B) I don't plan on connecting it to the Internet anyway, because I have seen a number of commenters mention on Amazon that you should not do software updates for region free Blu-ray players, because sometimes after the software update, the player loses its region-free capability for some reason. I have seen a number of people mention this, so I decided to just never connect my player to the Internet to be safe. (Of course, I could connect it to the Internet and just make sure that the auto-update feature is off, but I figured it's safer to just not have it connected to the Internet.) If I do need Internet for some reason, such as to use a streaming service, I will just turn on the Internet on my Smart TV and use the streaming service there – my Smart TV has all the streaming services that the Blu-ray player has anyway.
I paid the $149 for the BRD player, plus I took the option of purchasing a 4-year insurance plan for less than $25. So I know that I will for sure have this player for at least 4 years
I dragged my feet for years on buying the region-free player, because I thought it was very expensive and maybe not that important anyway. But I realized recently how having it allows so many more BRD's be available to you - you'll never again have to worry about region-encoding - and $150 is not that much
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