Ideal Component Squish Work-Around?

[Wernski]

Hi, gang, and thanks for any advice anyone of you can drop in advance. I've got an issue I'm sure a bunch of us have, at least those of us still hanging onto older format media. When I bought my latest 4k TV, I made sure it had plenty of input options for all of my players (including laserdisc, VCR, etc), but I didn't realize until I played around with it is that the component (i.e. the red, white and yellow RCA jacks) squish the information to 480i. Obviously laserdiscs and such are inherently lower quality than blu, but they don't have to be AS low as they're currently playing on my set that's devoted to crushing the signal. For example, my old DVD player should at least be outputting to 720, right? My TV just won't accept it.

It seems like a known issue with current TVs, and I've been aware my TV has been doing it since I bought it years ago, but I've just put off dealing with it. So I'm just wondering what you guys have found to be the best (in terms of PQ, price management, convenience with #s of inputs, etc) solution?

Do you guys use those RCA > HDMI adapters (example), and if so, how well do they work? One annoyance I've noticed with those is that they seem to need to be externally powered; i.e. another wall plug. But then there seem to be simpler ones that don't (example).

I've seen cables, too, that are literally RCA on one end and HDMI on the other (example)... but I'm not sure if those would even work?

Or have you found other solutions? What do you guys still hanging onto older formats do?