High Resolution VGA To (BNC) Video and S-Video Converter

Review by A. Gift For You for High Resolution VGA To (BNC) Video and S-Video Converter
Rating:
I bought this converter because my new laptop only has HDMI and VGA out, and the TV in my bedroom only has S-Video and Component in. My primary use for the converter is to watch downloaded and streamed television shows on the TV in my bedroom. This converter gets the job done and is pretty simple to use. The instructions are not very clear, but if you know enough about what you are doing to know that you need to buy this, then you are probably savvy enough to figure it out on your own. I had to try all the NTSC configurations before I figured out which one worked correctly. It took about 10 minutes to set up and figure out and then I was good to go. The image is not super-clear, but that is really due to the resolution of the tv rather than the converter. At first the the top, bottom, and sides were cut off, but there is a zoom button you can toggle to correct this (at least that’s how it worked for me). There are also a few more options in the converter’s menu you can use to try to make your image better. Again, if you bought this then you probably know enough to figure it out, but with the instructions not being very good you should expect to have to play around with it a bit before you get it right.

I don’t know if this is normally the case, but this particular converter came with all the cables you would need to hook it up, which was nice because I had forgotten that I needed to steal a VGA cable from work when it arrived in the mail. It comes with S-Video, Composite Video (Yellow), and a VGA cable. It also comes with a USB cable, which is how the converter is powered from your computer. I hadn’t realized that it would need a power source. No big deal, it just would have been nice to know (It’s very possible that this info is included in the product description and I just didn’t see it). $30 (with shipping) seems kind of expensive for something that is probably very simple and cheap to produce, but that seems to be the going rate. Even [...] was about the same. There is another converter listed on Amazon that I could have shipped for free with Prime, but it still would have been more expensive so I took a shot with this one.

Overall I’m pretty satisfied with the product so far. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because the included instructions were not very clear and it took a little while to set up and make the image look right, rather than being plug-and-play.

Review by Michael Opager for High Resolution VGA To (BNC) Video and S-Video Converter
Rating:
All in all, this does the job I purchased it for – to view PC output on a TV. My primary gripe is that every time I turn the PC on, I have to adjust the zoom control – it defaults to zoomed-in mode at power-up, while all the other settings seem to remain consistent. For the price, I can live with this minor annoyance. And as other reviewers have mentioned, the documentation that comes with this is incredibly weak, but anyone with even a modicum of technical knowledge will have no problem getting this set up correctly.