It's kind of amazing if you think about how much the internet has brought ideas and information from around the world together since its' inception. It's now quite a regular occurrence for many of us to check out Japanese tech sites (with the help of a translator) for the latest info on new computing gadgets from that side of the world.

It's with this thought of the global village in mind that we decided to look at some consumer electronics - something we don't normally focus on. What we're looking today at is no ordinary VCR, but rather a world-wide compatible VCR. As many of you already know, video formats change as you move from continent to continent. In North America we use NTSC, in Europe they use PAL, and in Asia SECAM. Each of those acronyms stands for a different broadcast system, and none of them are interchangeable.

As anyone from the UK can attest to, picking up a copy of Clockwork Orange on your trip to Canada or the US is not a way around British censors, but simply a waste of money. While that contraband Clockwork Orange video tape may be in VHS cassette format, the North American version is encoded in NTSC, and trying to play it in a European VCR that only reads PAL will simply result in a static-filled television screen. Naturally, Stanley Kubric's masterpiece can always be professionally transferred to PAL encoding, but this typically costs $40 a tape and results in a loss of image quality.

The SV-7000W is a solution to this problem and many more. This VHS VCR will play any tape from any country, and output a signal to anyone of the following broadcast formats: NTSC, NTSC 4.43, PAL-M, PAL-N, PAL, SECAM, MESECAM. The versatility of the VCR lies in the fact that it can read any format and digitally output that signal into any format - hence the "worldwide VCR" title. It doesn't matter if your TV is PAL only, and the tape is SECAM, the SV-7000W digitally translates between the two. It's a very cool feature, but one that comes with a very hefty price tag of about $950CDN.

The SV-7000W comes with: instructions, remote, coaxial cable, RF-adaptors, video/audio RCA cables, batteries.