As the sun sets on Prime Day, that doesn’t mean Amazon isn’t continuing to offer tempting sales on a variety of gaming products. And wouldn’t you know it, one of my favorite ever Nintendo Switch gizmos is still being offered at a discounted price, despite the huge summer sale event being officially over.
Right now, the Marseille mClassic 1440p Upscaler is on sale for $79 at Amazon. That’s 20 bucks off its regular list price of $99. In my native U.K. the deal isn’t quite as good, yet the Marseille mClassic Upscaler is down to £89 at Amazon, which is still a decent £10 saving over its normal £99 tag.
The Marseille mClassic is an impressive upscaler that’s best paired with either the likes of my Nintendo Switch OLED or retro consoles via an HDMI adapter (though it also works with PS5 and PS5 Slim, Xbox Series X/S and docked handheld PCs, such as the Steam Deck.
While I think games like the recently released Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD look terrific on the 7-inch screen of my OLED handheld, Marseille’s plug-and-play device is a doddle to set up and does a pretty great job of making games look more pristine and smoother in action if you're playing on a large 4K TV.
The mClassic has three different switches: one that leaves the output resolution of your console untouched, another that can scale games up to 1440p (2560 x 1440), and a final option designed to sharpen the pixels of retro titles.
I’ve owned this HDMI upscaler for over a year now, and while I still do the vast majority of my Switch gaming in Handheld mode, the mClassic has made the times when I feel like playing Nintendo’s handheld hybrid on my 77-inch LG G3 OLED TV a lot easier on my eyes.
The main weapon the mClassic holds up its sleeve is its ability to bake in a form of anti-aliasing for games that don’t have any. And when it comes to even the very best Switch games, you’ll find a lot of them have no form of AA at all — with Nintendo itself ironically being one of the worst offenders for not applying a graphical technique that helps smooth out unsightly in-game “jaggies”.
Even bonafide classics like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom don’t look all that hot on 4K TVs, despite the fact Link’s open-world sequel uses both a dynamic resolution scaler to keep frame rates up and AMD FSR 1. Sadly, the Red Team’s first stab at super sampling leaves a lot to be desired and is nowhere near as effective at improving image quality as the company’s much improved FSR 3.1 that is now available in select Steam Deck games and on PCs and gaming laptops.
There’s just one slight caveat, though. In its enhanced upscaler mode, I experience screen flicker when I plug an HDMI cable into the back of the two third-party Switch docks I own, as well as on Nintendo’s much more expensive official model.
Thankfully, turning the Switch’s output resolution to 720p fixes this issue. And honestly, playing upscaled games with a form of anti-aliasing on the mClassic looks considerably better to my eyes than many titles than run natively between 900p-1080p in Docked mode that lack AA.
If you regularly play your Nintendo Switch on a big 4K TV, I strongly suggest you check out this deal on the Marseille mClassic.
More from Tom's Guide
- I’ve been using this OLED monitor with my Nintendo Switch for 6 months
- I tested this gadget that makes Switch games look way better on 4K TVs
- I desperately want a Nintendo Switch 2 OLED — here's why it won't happen
