The old saying “you get what you pay for” is usually true.

Recently I had a brilliant idea. Instead of hooking up my old computers and video game consoles to a large television, wouldn’t it be nice if I could hook them up to a small flat screen monitor? I have a couple of 4:3 ratio flat screen monitors out in the garage that could work for just such a project. The only hurdle is that those monitors only have VGA inputs, and my old computers and video game consoles all have RCA (composite) outputs. If only someone made a cheap RCA-to-VGA converter…

Enter SLLEA, who sells just such an adapter on Amazon for $20. Before I go any further, I must mention two things. One, SLLEA is one of a dozen companies selling essentially the exact same product. The external plastic cases of these devices are slightly different, but based on the layout of the inputs and outputs, inside, they’re all the same. And second, all of these devices hover around the $20 range.

In the top picture, you can see the ins and outs (literally) of the device. In the second picture, you can see the series of buttons that allow you to configure the device. The fact that the word “MENU” is misspelled on the label gives you some insight to the quality of the manual.

Without belaboring the point, here were my results with SLLEA’s adapter.

Yikes.

The first thing you’ll notice is that large rainbow-colored bar running across the top of the screen. That’s… not normal. I should also point out all the vertical “noise” lines running through the bottom half of the screen, and the blurry (and fading) text across the top portion. Sometimes phone cameras can introduce distortion into a photograph of a computer screen, but I can assure you, it looked just as bad in person.

For a thorough test, I decided to load up a game and see if it fared any better than plain text.

When I saw this screen, I got my hopes up. The distortion bar across the top is still there, but it’s barely visible. The Commodore 64 in particular has a border around the main portion of the screen. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all?

Unfortunately, once the game entered “full screen mode,” the bar returned.

I tried two additional systems for testing — an Apple IIe computer, and an original Nintendo Entertainment System — and got the same results. To be completely fair, I rescanned the device’s Amazon reviews and found several people who said it worked for systems newer than the Super Nintendo. Specifically, I read positive reviews from people who tried it with a Nintendo GameCube and a Sony PlayStation 2. If you’re looking for a Composite-to-VGA solution for one of those systems and feel adventurous, maybe you’ll have better luck with one of these devices. If, like me, you’re hoping to connect some old 8-bit systems up to a VGA monitor, this probably isn’t the device for you.