Originally Posted by dlouise37
Background: We brought a portable DVD player with us to the SIN DO in 2004. Can't swear to it but we believe we "cooked" it when we tried to charge the battery in SIN using the 220v 50Hz -->110v 60Hz converter we bought at the luggage store. This year not wanting to take any chances with the new DVD player, or the digital still camera or the digital movie camera or the laptop.... I had an idea.
Why not take the $50.00 UPS I have on my PC to BKK with us. Its' whole purpose in life is to deal with flakey input voltages right? I propose it should handle the output of the converter just fine.
I'm not sure if many standard/consumer UPSs will meet this usage.
Most UPS's respone to input voltage problems by simply going to battery. So in the case of my personal UPS (APC BackUPS Pro 420 IIRC), any voltage lower than 106.0 or higher than 127.0 will cause the system to switch to battery. There may be a similar function if the frequency is off of 60 Hz by much. So if you plug it in to 220V 50 Hz it will react by using the battery. It won't charge the battery or convert the 220V line voltage. Most portable UPSs won't have enough battery capacity to run a computer or DVD player for more than 15-60 minutes depending on capacity and load; your power:weight ratio would be better bringing spare laptop/DVD/camera batteries.
There are some expensive high-end UPSs that will convert anomalous line voltages (within reason) to standard power. They essentially do an AC - DC conversion on whatever AC voltage is present, run it through a voltage regulator, and then run the inverter to generate 120V 60 Hz. (Technically not a true sine wave in most UPSs; true-sine inverters are somewhat complicated, quite expensive, and unnecessary for the vast majority of uses.) I suppose if you have one of those and if 220 V is within the range it can handle, you would be able to do this. But I'd be very certain before I'd haul a heavy UPS on a transpacific trip.
As stated by other posters, check the specs on your power bricks for your devices. It is highly probable that your laptop and camera chargers will have "global power" tolerances. The brick for the Dell I'm typing this on can handle
100-240V AC 50/60 Hz input. All I need to use it overseas is a $0.10 adapter that makes the plug fit the wall; no electronics, just wires in the adapter. (usually costs much more than $0.10 in USA.) I don't know anything about portable DVD players but imagine they have power bricks similar to those on laptops.
A lot of the cheap little travel adapters you buy in stores are only designed for shavers and crude electric (not electronic) devices. They put out rough square-wave AC. You might have actually damaged your former unit that way.