Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Voltage Converters for Your Personal Electronics

If your Blackberry is your lifeline and you’re planning a trip overseas, you’ll need to invest in a voltage converter to keep it properly charged. Choosing the right voltage converter can mean the difference between keeping in touch with the office back home and spending half of your vacation out of touch while you shop for a replacement.

The Scoop on Traveling with Electronics

The U.S., Europe, Asia and other parts of the world have different standards for delivering electricity. In the U.S., most household electricity comes through a 110 V outlet—that’s your standard wall outlet with two slots and, often, a third round hole. European outlets deliver electricity at higher voltage, averaging between 210 and 220 V, and the outlet receptacles vary from country to country. Your phone charger won’t plug into a European wall outlet, and even if it could, the high voltage would fry the delicate electronics when you plug your phone into it.

The solution is to plug your charger into a device that will reduce the voltage coming from the wall outlet to a level that your phone charger can handle. That device is variously called a voltage converter or a voltage regulator.  You’ll find many types of voltage regulators on sale, many of them at very reasonable prices. Choosing the right one can be confusing, though, and if you’re not careful, you could still end up damaging your phone or other device.

Don’t Take Chances with Your Voltage Converters

When you buy a voltage converter, you have to know whether it needs to step up the voltage or step it down, and you need to know how many amps of electricity your device is rated for. If the voltage converter doesn’t deliver electricity at high enough amperage, your device won’t work. If it delivers too much, it can blow the circuits and burn out your device. If you travel with more than one device –like your coffee maker and your Blackberry—you may need two different voltage converters because the same one won’t be appropriate for powering both.

The solution is to buy a deluxe automatic voltage converter. These top of the line electrical devices are switchable—they can convert the voltage from a 110 V outlet and step it up to use with an appliance rated for 220 Vs, and vice versa. They’ll also automatically detect the appropriate amperage for the device youre plugging into it, and deliver the amount of amperage needed to power your device without frying it. If you’re buying a voltage converter for travel, it only makes sense to by the one that can handle it all.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Advantages of Code Free DVD Players

Code free DVD players, also known as region code free DVD players, allow you to watch DVDs that were released in any region across the world. Region codes were an effort by the major movie studios to cut down on piracy while allowing studios to release movies to different markets at different times. The DVDs are recorded with specific coding that will only play on a DVD player that has the same coding. For the consumer, especially the consumer who travels, that means that the DVD purchased on a visit to Japan will be useless when returning home because the DVD player would be unable to play it back.

The solution to the problem is a region free or code free DVD player – one that is not locked to playing only DVDs produced for release in the same region as the player. Region free DVD players were once extremely expensive, but in the past few years, prices have dropped considerably. You can now buy a code free DVD player that is no more expensive than a traditional region-locked DVD player.

DVD Region Codes

DVD coding divides the world into six regions:

-          Region 1: North America
-          Region 2: Western Europe and Japan
-          Region 3: Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong
-          Region 4: Australia and South America
-          Region 5: Russia and India
-          Region 6: Mainland China

Discs recorded for each region include software encoding, called Region Code Enhancement, or RCE. When you put a disc in the DVD player, the RCE on the disc checks the region on the player. If it doesn’t match, the disc won’t play. So, the disc you purchased online from a Japanese distributor has a good chance of not working in your U.S. made DVD.

Format

In addition to the region coding on DVDs and DVD players, different regions of the world also use different encoding formats when recording movies. DVDs recorded in North America, Japan and Hong Kong use the NTSC format. Europe, Russia and China use PAL coding. A disc recorded in one format won’t play on a DVD that plays the other format. To make things even more complicated, the television playing your DVD must also match the format, or you won’t get any picture. Again, there’s a solution—many region code free DVD players have a built-in converter that converts from one format to the other. If you’re purchasing a code free DVD player for use with a North American TV, be sure that the player includes a PAL to NTSC converter so that you’ll have access to all the features on the DVD.