You find 110-120v in North America and just a couple of other places (like Japan). 220-250v is standard in the rest of the world (Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, etc).

The voltage is usually over a range, in the 220-250 range. How it is described varies from country to country but the allowable range tends to be the same. The voltage drops the further you get from the substation, but the higher the voltage the less you lose on the way. You must have an awful lot of substations in the US.

Switches on the outlets are a UK standard as well, just like in Malaysia and elsewhere. So if small children stick something in the outlet they don't get killed by the shock as a number each year are in other countries. We think it's a good idea.

The various television systems described in the posts above are as follows (in order of both introduction and quality) :

NTSC (American) : Never Twice the Same Colour
SECAM (French) : System Essentially Contrary to the American Method
PAL (UK) : Picture At Last


Most places that came to colour after all three were available chose PAL. The US system did of course have the issue of having been first, which the others could then improve on. When Socialist Eastern Europe went colour in the 1970s they chose SECAM deliberately (one of the few to do so) so the sets could not receive PAL transmissions from adjacent West Germany, etc.

Regarding shipping stuff round, I did this some years ago with a friend shipping items from Canada to the UK. Many were fine with a transformer, but the record player was useless as it turned at 5/6 of expected speed UNTIL I found there was an adaptation inside where a rubber drive band could be moved, this was obviously how the manufacturer made one unit to cater for all markets. So each item has its own challenges. We had two transformers but no frequency converter.

Among other difficulties a radio with presets didn't work because although the FM frequency band for radio is the same, the "steps" between frequencies are different (0.2 MHz in Canada, 0.3 MHz in UK). I expect your coffee pot will be fine (ours was), drill and saw will run a bit slower but probably acceptable, computer fine, TV very little chance.

If you have several items you may want to bring a US-standard extension cable with multiple outlets which you can plug into the transformer and then plug multiple items into it, as US-standard multi-way connections are of course unobtainable elsewhere. Some of the transformers on the market also have multiple US-standard outlets on them to cater for this.

Regarding DVDs you will run into the issue of Region Codes, imposed by the manufacturers to prevent DVDs being shipped round the world in a way their marketing department does not want. Your US DVD disks put into an Australian-purchased player would probably come up with "Wrong Region Code" and be unplayable. We have this problem with Russian-language DVDs, only available in Russia, being unplayable on our DVD here in London. For some reason laptop DVDs do not have this control so you can play anything in them.