Big fan of these forums, first time posting.
I don't know much about video but I have an xrgb mini that I use for playing games with my Saturn and PS2 on a large OLED TV. Recently I've also become fond of playing PSP with the component cable. While the xrgb mini + firebrand's psp profiles do look quite good, they don't seem to work well with the xrgb mini's scanlines feature. A lot of PSP games seem like they'd really benefit from scanlines. In addition, the output scaling never quite fits the tv without some zoom, which blurs the image. In general, I am not fully satisfied with the output of the PSP, and was hoping to find a way to improve it.
I've heard that these scanline issues have to do with the output being 480p and the xrgb mini not handling this well. While it had been suggested that I try out the OSSC, I really am fond of my xrgb mini and am not keen on spending more money on another scaler that works for me already (and I like). I hadn't any good ideas until recently when I found some threads here discussing scaling 480p output to 240p, for instance, for playing Dreamcast in progressive mode on a CRT.
My question revolves around the process of downscaling. The term suggests a loss of quality, which is (I guess?) negligible on a CRT. If I were to get a device to downscale and set up something like below, what kind of result would I expect?
PSP Component Out (480p component) -> component to vga -> corio c2-400 -> vga to rgbs -> xrgb
Would the result look like it had lost quality? Furthermore, why doesn't anyone do something like this with PS2? I understand not wanting scanlines for most PS2 titles, but what about filling the screen? It seems like the big problem with 480p is that 480 x2 scaling doesn't quite fill a modern tv, while 240 x3 scaling is perfect. Can anyone correct me about this and let me know what the best option might be for 480p component out with the xrgb mini? Thanks.