I'm living in Tokyo, which would definitely qualify me as having "major space issues"
Plus it's just fun to mess around with this stuff. Sure it'll never be as good as a nice CRT, but It gets the job done.
Some of the boxes on ebay are surely janky, but they aren't as bad as those VGA boxes. I opened mine up and, surprisingly, the construction was quality. I was pretty surprised with my results after what you posted, Black Tiger. My conversion box outputs in either 720p or 1080p, but I couldn't tell any difference between them.
First picture is composite -> HDMI convertor -> Computer LCD panel.
Second picture is RGB -> HDMI convertor -> Computer LCD panel.
Composite:
RGB (ignore the interference, I didn't have all the grounds hooked up yet)
Just using composite It looks a damn sight better than on my girlfriends plasma TV. The RGB signal is working for me, but it's having problems. I built in the 3-transistor amp into my SCART shell, but the picture looks a bit too bright. I'll try it without the transistors, or perhaps with some 75ohm resistors in-line. Also the picture is really shaky, probably because the composite-sync line
does need a transistor. I'll do some tweaking when I have time. I'm probably going to have to just use composite for now, because I forgot something. The CD audio gets mixed inside the interface unit, so my clean mini-din 8 mod is worthless for audio
I'll probably just end up tapping RGB/Audio from within the interface unit and putting a plug on that somewhere. I kinda didn't want to mod it though.
Some other thoughts:
Mmmonkey's web site (and a lot of other ones) recommend putting 5v into SCART pin 8, so that's what I did. My picture ended up at 16:9 like yours, Black Tiger. I checked the SCART specs, and pin 8 is supposed to be:
0v+ for TV select
5v+ for 16:9
12v+ for 4:3
Try disconnecting pin 8 and it may default to 4:3.