Heyho!
I received my Retrotink4k yesterday and I already played around a bit for video capturing. I have been using the datapath before together with VCS 2.6.0
The issue with the 640x480 resolution being cut off by a few lines does not exist with the Retrotink4k.
The phase can be set automatically but you do need to dial in the width correctly and this to me feels even more finnicky as you need to use the remote. But once its set up, it works fine.
It's also a great that you can basically make the signal almost "ready to use" with the tink alone.
For example 320x200 being 720x400 first need to be decimated and then upscaled.
While 720x400 textmode does not need to be decimated and needs to be upscaled differently, and also comes with a different signal. Once set up, it can easily switched by the press of a button, while in VCS you need to manually change the input video preset for the signal, and then change the processing settings in the Filter graph.
So it's much more confortable to use once it's set up.
But there are also some cons:
-The remote, as indicated already, is a bit fiddly. The interface is ok. But using the remote feels like back in the 90s where you need to press a button multiple times for anything to work, depending on the angle to the device and whatnot. Guess an alternative would have been cheaper. But with a 850€ device 50€ more wouldnt have hurt either.
-It seems to be unable to have standard profiles for resolutions. So I think you need to switch your profiles manually every single time. This also means that you will have a bad time playing a game which uses different modes which need to be handled differently. It does however for some reason kinda save something like phase set in modes, and not in profiles. I am not quite sure I understood it completely yet.
But if you have a 320x200 game which should be scaled to 1280x1000 and in the game you have a map which is 640x480 which needs to be scaled to 1280x960, you will run into issues as you would need to manually switch it every single time if I see it correctly. Only way I see to circumvent most of these issues is to just settle for the same process for all different resolutions, with not so optimal results then.
I think it should be possible to change this easily via software though, where for each mode you could just set one standard profile.
But I also encountered some issues with recording which might not be directly tink4k related, but which I didnt encounter before with the datapath, possibly due to the magic which happens within VCS.
I will post more about that in a separate post, with plenty of info as I would also need some help there.