The world of retro game upscalers is pretty wild, and over the years, enthusiasts have spent countless amounts of money on these products – with good reason.
If you want to get the best possible picture out of your vintage system when using a modern-day TV, an upscaler is a must; not only does it clean up the signal massively, it also has support for cool things like limitation scanlines, creating the 'look' of playing on an old-school CRT. The very best upscalers will do all of this without adding lag to the image – another common issue when feeding old analogue signals into your fancy flatscreen TV.
Devices such as the FrameMeister XRGB-Mini and OSSC have caught our attention in the past, but the king of the hill right now is arguably the RetroTINK series, created by Mike Chi. We've got a RetroTINK 5X in the office and never cease to be amazed at the kind of magic it is capable of creating when given fuzzy, SD-level signals – but Chi is about to launch its successor, and it's shaping up to be even more impressive.
The RetroTINK 4K supports a wide range of AV inputs and will be capable of sending a crisp, 4K/60 signal to your modern-day television. It's designed to be a next-generation upscaler / line-doubler and will allow for a wide selection of filters to be applied, giving you the chance to convincingly create the screen image you remember from the past.
These devices have never been cheap, and the RetroTINK 4K isn't going to be an exception. Chi himself previously hinted that its price could be as much as $1000, but we now have official confirmation of the cost: $750.
Units are expected to ship in early December and will be taken from inventory – refreshingly, this isn't a pre-order for a product that will get made in the future, but one that exists right now.
Will you be laying down the cash for one of these? Let us know with a comment below.