I think I'll share my experience with a couple of cheap upscalers in order to spare some GAFers the experience of jumping in blind.
First I should explain that I was predominantly interested in something that would upscale S Video. The reason for that is that I bought a Super Retro Trio expecting that my 2011 Panny plasma would have S video inputs the same way my old 2006 Panny plasma did. Well, turns out it doesn't, so I'm stick with composite. And in any case, the TV's scaler is treating the signal as 480i.
So, forewarned that they'd probably suck, I bit the bullet and blindly bought a couple of cheap(ish) upscalers to try out. I first tried to buy the Coosis box here:
http://www.coosis.com/products-page...-rca-w-s-video-to-hdmi-080-ultimate-features/
The reason being that it would handle both S video and SCART, so it would give me the option to upgrade to RGB in the future if I so chose. At the time it was out of stock and the Coosis sales people said it was discontinued. So, believing I wouldn't be able to get it, I bought the Portta PETCSHP 3 R Converter for about $33 on eBay.
Now, first the good: it does what it sets out to do. Specifically, it allowed me to use the S video output on my TV, and the image is indeed much sharper than composite could ever hope to be. Although I didn't do any sophisticated timing tests, I didn't perceive even a hint of lag in the conversion, which is definitely a plus.
That said, this still treats 240p as 480i and produces the artifacts expected as a result. It also seems to heighten the contrast in a way that seemed jarring (it does this with both S video and composite, so I know it's not just the cable) and resulted in an image that was a good bit darker than expected. It also has no aspect ratio selection (which I knew beforehand) and my TV can't horizontally compress HD images, so I was stuck with the stretch. Also, composite upscaling looked terrible, far worse than what my TV's default scaler did.
So, the negatives are pretty extensive, but for the price, I could see this being an acceptable solution for some. If my TV could 'squish' the image, it would undoubtedly be better than composite and preferable even despite the heightened contrast. That said, it's not quite what I was looking for.
After having ordered the PORTTA box, I got word that Coosis had managed to restock the scaler I was originall interested in and ended up getting that as well. Given that it had an S Video input, an aspect ratio selector, and even independent video controls, this seemed like it had to be the superior product, right?
...
No GAF, it is not. I'll type out why a bit later, but suffice to say, you shouldn't buy it as it is wholly unsuitable for any game console.