First of all, I am not an academic guy, but rather a practical guy who have started to dig into SQL Server. As for the comments.

I commented on varbinary not for academic reasons, but for practical. The academics (at least the ones I've spoken to) tell you to use variable length whenever the length is varying, I recommend to use only variable length when it results in reduced storage needed.

I dislike casting to varchar without length because it is a bad habit which does not always work, for instance it does not work for uniqueidentifers. Casting to a suitable length does always work.

As for varbinary, that is a perfect name. It is stored binary, now matter how you look at it. If you retrieve the data from for instance .NET Framework, it will be binary, and you'll have to convert it to hex yourself. It is SQL Server Management studio (or whatever other software you're using) which is representing the data as hex to you.