Why You Can Trust CNET This Prime Day Nintendo Deal Is a Great Add-on for Switch Owners
The mClassic helps smooth out edges in lower resolution games, which is especially handy for the Switch.
The mClassic dongle can improve the graphics in certain console games, most notably lower-resolution Switch titles. (Better-looking Legend of Zelda, anyone?)
With Amazon Prime Day underway, there are plenty of Nintendo Switch and other video game deals flooding the internet. And as awesome as the Nintendo Switch is for playing games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or the upcoming Super Mario Wonder, the system is now showing its age. Compared to the PS5 and Xbox Series X, the Nintendo Switch typically runs games at 1080p or below. This leads to a less sharp image on large 4K displays with lots of jagged edges, known as aliasing.
Luckily, there are some aftermarket products that can help mitigate this. The mClassic by Marseille is a small HDMI upscaler that bumps up the resolution of all your older systems. This means that a 720p image gets bumped up to 1080p, along with some anti-aliasing tech to smooth over edges.
Right now, the Marseille mClassic is on sale for $80. That's $20 off the regular retail price. It's a lightning deal, meaning that once it's sold out, it's gone.
I've been using the mClassic for years and have written about it in the past. While it won't completely transform your Switch to produce PS5-level image quality, it does give it a modest visual bump. For some, the difference might be negligible. For others, especially pixel-peepers like myself, it cleans the round faces in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and sharpens the glow of Samus' suit in Metroid Dread enough for me to notice.
It should be noted that some TVs have internal upscalers as well. For some, the mClassic might fail to make significant difference if their TV's upscaler is already doing the heavy lifting.