I have discovered by accident that my TV (Akai CTS2550, 25") which is cheap, designed for american market (and is not multi-system according to its manual), can actually play PAL video signal. The trick is to connect a DVD player, which is capable of playing PAL, to the TV using three component video cables, and to set the player into the "multi-system" mode. When playing a PAL disk (DVD, SVCD, VCD, DivX), the TV switches to PAL mode (you can hear that the high-pitch static sound changes). The quality is significantly better than when using internal PAL-NTSC converter inside the DVD player (I tried two - Norcent DP300 and Philips DVP642/37). I cannot garantee, but it's possible that other cheap not-multi-system TVs made for the american market are capable of playing PAL video in this fashion. My bet would be that TVs made by large multinational corporations (like Sony, Toshiba etc.) have a higher chance of being capable of playing PAL through component video connection.

A word of caution: Switching to PAL mode pushes your TV into somewhat different frequences, which can in principle damage your TV if used for a long time. (But I've used mine for almost a year without any problems.) Try it at your own risk!