Data being returned with upper ASCII chars changed!

[!NoItAll]

I think I have the wrong collation set on a database I restored to a different server.
Somehow the data in a varbinary field (it's used to store a date) is being returned incorrectly.
Here's what I mean:
In the query analyzer the data shows up as:

0xDD3FC20120A42A940000000000000000

However with the following select statement:

select convert(char(8), itemdate) as mydate from item_data where itemid=12345678
 

Instead of getting

<DD><3F><C2><01><20><A4><2A><94>

I get this mess

<A6><3F><2D><01><20><F1><2A><F6>

I think it has something to do with an incorrect collation setting because every character in the extended ASCII range (>7F) is returned translated. All of the characters in the lower ASCII range (01 to 7F) are returned properly.
The current Collation name is: SQL_Latin1_General_CP850_CI_AS
I think I need something that is designed for UTF8 - but I'm not sure...
If I do need to change the collation - how do I do that? I can't find a setting to change it.

[!NoItAll]

After further investigation I was right. Having the wrong collation was causing fields I was converting to char translated. Any char above 7F would get translated to the current collation set. When I restored the archive to my new machine it offered several collation options - clearly I chose the wrong one.
To fix this it is very easy.

I executed the following commands:

select * from ::fn_helpcollations()

This gave me a list of all the available collations. I chose a straight binary one - assuming no translation would take place with this in place.

Latin1_General_BIN

So I then executed the following command (available from SQL 2000 and up)

alter database [my_database] collate Latin1_General_BIN

Voila! I am now getting the chars untranslated and my calculations now produce the correct dates.

I found the following article via Google:

http://www.databasejournal.com/featu...-Collation.htm