mClassic for my specific use case?

[fuctfuct]

I've always done most of my console gaming at my desk. Oddly never really been into PC gaming, lol, until relatively recently.

Anyways, my main monitor is 1440p nowadays. PC games are radical on it, but I still play my PS3/4/360/WiiU. The consoles generally look okay on it. Though a tad soft due to using the monitor to upscale.

I've been looking into the mClassic. Watched a ton of videos and done a bit or reading. Generally not liked by the reviewers I trust. Nobody really mention this use case though. Seems like it would be perfect since it is built to upscale 720p/1080p signals, and its max output is 1440p/60.

Thoughts?

[Ziggy]

The Retro TINK 4K is on the horizon. It's not going to be cheap, but it might be the new king of upscalers.

https://www.retrotink.com/post/introduc ... trotink-4k

[marurun]

The mClassic is nice, but it can’t fix everything. It does make things look cleaner but it still won’t look crisp. I guess it depends on what your threshold for improvement is. Try to find some still shot comparisons online.

I do know the mClassic is supposed to recognize 1440p but only if it’s the standard variant. No ultrawide.

[Anapan]

I didn't like it. Couldn't find a use case.

[fuctfuct]

I feel like for this specific use case it would should perform better than any monitors scaler. Monitors expect a native signal, so their scalers tend to be very basic.

It's not something anyone really brings up when talking about it. Frustrating. I figured it would be a huge talking point given the popularity of 1440p monitors these days. At $130 CAD its not exactly cheap to try on a whim. Guess I could return it, if I don't like it.

I've been watching the development of the Tink 4k. It looks amazing, but it's not something I think I would ever buy heh. I play all non HDMI consoles VIA emulation these days. For what it will cost, the 4k would be extreme overkill for HDMI consoles only. In my use case anyways. If it was $200 I'd try it. But we all know it will be an order of magnitude more than that, lol. If I gamed a lot on one of my 4k OLED TVs, it might make more sense, heh. But I rarely even use one of them. I always find myself at my desk, or using the TV in my bedroom to watch movies/shows.

[Anapan]

What I found with my 1080p and 2160p screens is that it doesn't add much. The algorithm does try to make aliased edges "look" like higher resolution, and occasionally makes a stair-stepped high-contrast edge like look like an emulator running at a higher resolution. It applies this filter to the whole screen indiscriminately tho and makes a lot of the picture look muddled. On my 1080p screen it didn't seem to map it's sharp-edge replacements to individual pixels on the screen, rather it did it's thing very sharply, and then upscaled that to the 1080p screen slightly up-blurred but resulted in an image that is not as blurry as bicubic for those edges it identified as aliased 3D to be made sharp and smooth lines. Overall the effect wasn't amazing to the point that buying it was a worthwhile endeavor IMO, tho I had to try it for myself. Only a few games benefitted greatly from it and I wasn't going to dig it out of the closet for those few games. Alot of what it did reminded me of early AI upscaling filters that made things noisy, muddy and weird-looking.

[fuctfuct]

Thanks. :'( heh

I was planning on buying (still am) another 1440p monitor. One of the new 27 inch OLEDs. Was hoping this would halp. Its almost cheaper to just also buy a 1080p screen for these consoles, lol. Might just do that.

To be clear, were your sources retro (non HDMI) consoles? Or HD consoles?

[Anapan]

I tried it on many sources; PS1, PS2, PS3, GameCube, Switch, Saturn & low resolution PC titles. I transcoded, pre-scaled and deinterlaced when necessary. Some people really like it. On 480p sources it did have some benefit. I found RetroRGB Bob's lag testing review to be very accurate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Bv-siMaqjQ&t=185s
MLIG also did an in-depth review showing off some great examples of games that will definitely benefit. Pre-rendered 3D cartoon-like games do look better, tho those look fine bilinear filtered anyway.
https://youtu.be/AQAiZ96FZwI?t=1129

[fuctfuct]

Thanks again.

Guess i'll be buying the ASUS PG27AQDM and another 1080p screen for older stuff. Wish they made 1080p OLEDs.
I currently actually have a 1080p as my secondary screen but its a very slow VA panel I got super cheap.

I guess i COULD just deal with the very slight blur playing 1080p on 1440p. It really isnt that bad. It's not even as bad as playing PS3 (720p mostly) on a 1080p sceen. I did that for years.

Cheers

[Anapan]

They make 1080p oled monitors. I had my eye on an Asus one a few months back, but decided against getting yet another monitor I don' need.
Just had to make sure I wasn't making it up - There's a section here for desktop sized ones a few pages down:
https://www.displayninja.com/best-oled-monitor/
edit: ah, I see what you mean, they're all tiny.