OK, I received the S-Media box. It is hooked up as follows: VHS player to composite input (for tapes); DVD player to svideo input; Comcast SD cable to RF input (sound is output through stereo miniplug to Harman Kardon for CATV); PC's VGA output to VGA input (passthrough, cable supplied by S-Media); VGA output to A10X.
The S-Media box has color/hue/sharpness/brightness/contrast controls. Settings are retained for each of the three inputs individually. There is a noise reduction setting that I have set to high for the RF input. The channel scan picked up all of my existing cable channels. I set the S-Media box to output
[email protected] (the native resolution of the A10X). There is also a setting for overscan, underscan and center. I have it set to overscan (even though I do not know what this does).
My screen is 100" diagonal and my viewing distance is 12'.
SD cable - I can say without reservation that the picture is much sharper. And, the white text overlays (on news channels, for instance) are no longer dancing around, they are steady. The wife noticed the improvement immediately. The picture is not perfect: from two feet away you can see noise. But, from my normal viewing distance, it looks very good.
VHS player - Same improvement as SD cable.
DVD - The image appears to be ever so slightly sharper. I cannot detect any loss of picture quality. I thought I might due to the fact that I was using component and am now using svideo.
PC - no change in image quality, as was expected.
I had a distinct lack of sharpness before on my analog sources. I don't know if the problem was the projector's internal scaler, or maybe that there were two processors converting the signal (de-interlacer and scaler). The output of the S-Media box is clean and sharp (to mine and my wife's eyes). I will be keeping this setup.
Another problem I had with the iScan was that every channel change caused a re-sync on the A10X. The S-Media box does exhibit this behavior, not even when switching input sources. The S-Media box also eliminates the need for my manual VGA switchbox.