Whats the current state of rotation scalers

[Hoagtech]

Im looking to rotate a 16:9 lcd and then rotate the image to view in Horizontal over tate.

What are the current solutions and drawbacks of these rotation video devices?

I would rather view my 4:3 content with one big black bar underneath the image instead of either side of it. Also would like to know if these rotation devices have an image shift function to move to one side of the panel

[orange808]

Wait for the OSSC Pro. There's nothing that's inexpensive and user-friendly.

[alamone]

Wait for the OSSC Pro. There's nothing that's inexpensive and user-friendly.

This, pretty much. You're looking at units that cost thousands of dollars, not hundreds of dollars, and aren't really tailored towards gaming. Also, just because of the nature of the operation, you're going to have a minimum of 1 frame of lag.

[orange808]

You're looking at units that cost thousands of dollars, not hundreds of dollars, and aren't really tailored towards gaming.

Well, not thousands. A Kramer vp-794 can be had for about $1300usd right now. That should do it. I don't know of any recent available bargains on a suitable machine. I don't spend that kind of money. I target a machine and wait until something appears at an affordable price. $1300usd is too much.

It does the warp/rotation and padding. Unfortunately, you absolutely must set up the warp using a networked PC running the Calibre/Kramer management software. You can't get low lag rotation (with padding) in the scaler's GUI menu. It's inconvenient to set up.

It's obviously expensive.

It does a really nice job scaling, but it's not full 4:4:4. You can feed "line quad" 960p to get around that. It accepts every signal I've been able to feed through the OSSC. Any PCB that synced with the OSSC worked fine. I've never fed it game input that isn't line doubled and I think that's a bad idea; use a line doubler first. If you use horizontal and vertical scanlines, you can't maintain aspect ratio and have clean scanlines on both axis. The scaling engine does better with scanlines on one axis. About 25ms of lag. It has frame lock and it does fine with odd refresh rates that work with the OSSC. I have no idea what it would do with crazy sync jitter from an extremely out of spec arcade PCB; that would probably not work. I think it tops out at 1080p output. You can't tell it to output an arbitrary resolution or refresh rate; it's not programmable.

The OSSC Pro will outperform this someday soon for less. I bet the OSSC Pro will be ~17ms latency with better scanlines.

I wouldn't buy a Calibre at those prices. The Calibre HQView 320 and Kramer vp-792 are the specific models of that scaler that have been resold at reasonable prices. I haven't seen either unit up for sale very often. The vp-794 is the "deluxe" version with more inputs and better switching options.

Kramer branded models are functionally identical to the Calibre except for the name on the box. Be careful shopping other models. Some don't offer the warp mapping and rotation you need. I recommend specific units for a reason. I was hunting bargains on these at one time and I did my homework to identify the units that will work.

Wait for the OSSC Pro.

P.S. : Full warp processors have one parlour trick, but it's not something many users will want. You can add a fisheye effect and only warp the pixels around the edges for a faux-CRT curved glass effect. I doubt the OSSC Pro will offer arbitrary image warping options.

[bobrocks95]

Mike Chi has taken a crack at rotation for the Tink 4K and maybe the 5X as well, no promises though because he said it was harder than he thought it'd be.