Suggestions for the best CHEAP VGA to HDMI converter?

technical questions/help
1

LAst year I got a bunch of photo and video stuff at a yardsale (a guy down the street was moving to NYC to work on that Whitney Huston biopic and sold me as much of his old gear as I could haul away for $50 - mostly nice stands and a bunhc of filters that don’t fit any camera I own) and one of the things I got was a last gen, 1080p Atomos Ninja Star. There’s no way I’d be able to afford CFast cards, but I could probably swing a CFast to SATA adapter and a 1tb SSD and use it to make lossless recordings straight from hardware. If I go that route, I won’t have much left over for getting the VGA output from the scaler converted to HDMI, and since the price range for active converters (the kind that actually work) is all over the place I really have no idea what’s actually decent in the sub $50 range (or better yet sub $30).

480i s-video to HDMI would be great, but I can also upscale to 720p VGA. Quality for the price is more important than resolution - upscaling in software usually works better but the old scaler seems to deinterlace better than any software I’ve tried so it’ll be a tradeoff either way.

Anyone have any favorites to recommend?

2

Ended up going with a used Ocean Matrix OMX-CV-HDMI - only a little more expensive than a no-name, budget converter and hopefully being marketed as a low priced converter for professional installations means it will actually have halfway decent picture quality.

3

Honestly I was pretty happy with my cheap ~$8 USD VGA-HDMI box but I also don’t have a setup where I could honestly discern any difference.

4

Neither do I, but I usually use the output from it as raw footage, and I start to notice differences once things get digitized and scaled up. I use a sub $10 HDMI to component converter to hook old consoles up to an old HDCRT sometimes and it looks great, so I probably spent an extra $20 for no reason.

I just know that the cheap USB capture devices I’ve used are really hit and miss - some of them are almost indistinguishable from much more expensive hardware and others in the same price range are almsot unusable.