Well, it was a massive project to get my PC up and running DScaler again (had to format/reload, and the floppy hardware on my motherboard has apparently burnt out; just trust that it was an adventure :p), but now I've got it up and I was able to sloppily A/B Dscaler and the VB50. The VB50 stacks up surprisingly well in picture clarity and, for the most part, sharpness of detail. The color is very strong, which for my video game consoles is fine (actually a bit preferable; still tweaking about with DScaler to mimic these more eye popping color values), but was unnatural for the most part with any sort of DVD material. DVD from my Hollywood+ via SVideo was very similar in quality to the same hardware doing video overlay via the VGA passthrough. It was hard to get the color to match well given the coarseness of the VB50's adjustments, but if you can live with slightly more "vivid" coloring, it did very well. However, neither of these solutions holds up well to even my old PowerDVD 3.0 that was packed in with my DVD drive, but since they're both non-progressive solutions, would you really expect them to? The main problem I ran into was combing. Mostly, it wasn't a problem. With the Game Cube (if you don't count any of the lackluster quality intro movies on some of the games), live action DVDs, CG DVDs (like Bug's Life), and high quality anime transfers (like Princess Mononoke), I didn't really notice any combing. However with my Dreamcast (especially Soul Calibur), and the majority of my anime collection, there was considerable combing with quick motions.
Still at odds about what to do with the device. Its a very well done unit, and has lots of possible uses outside of my main rig (building a cheap small TV out of a cheap 15" monitor, etc.) I don't have any projection gear that might have need of an external scaler, but I can attest to the quality scaling the unit provides. The deinterlacing is just not on par with Dscaler, and even my old Voodoo4 scales at least as well as the VB50. On the upside, it is plug and play with simple controls and a remote (which I did finally get working; I think that the sensor inside the main unit just needed to "warm up" or something), doesn't require a PC to be used (or would be useful for those stuck with lower end PCs that wouldn't be able to really take advantage of DScaler), and has absolutely no input signal noise (though it does seem to have a bit of output signal noise; if you look close, just about all pixels seem to be "sizzling"; I imagine that the filter removal mod from the output would fix that).
Kensai
