Review on 🎮 Marseille Inc. mCable Gaming Edition HDMI Cable - 3-foot Length by Steven Pankey

Marseille mCable is a unique HDMI cable that provides additional processing to the incoming image without increasing latency. These add-ons, which I will detail below, work great and have very few downsides. However, the benefits of these add-ons vary wildly depending on the type of content you give it, which will determine whether or not this cable is worth the price. This cable does a really good job of running older generations of games, with newer and more powerful hardware yielding lower returns. mCable does several things for your image. It adds a custom type of anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from objects, upscales content to 1080p for content below, ups the contrast a bit, makes minor adjustments to color levels, and adds some sharpness. Contrast, color and sharpness settings are pretty low and can cause some problems. I would have preferred to be able to turn them off, but there's no way to select the effects you want. Increasing the contrast caused an issue with my setup resulting in distorted black levels resulting in a loss of detail which was addressed by setting the HDMI color space to Limited or 16-235. The most notable additions here are anti-aliasing and scaling, and they really make a big difference when both are active. Anti-aliasing works like a sort of anti-aliasing filter for the rough edges you get in some games. The interesting thing about anti-aliasing is that it isn't applied evenly across the entire image, creating a blurry look that loses a lot of detail when applied this way. Very little detail is lost and some of those jagged edges are removed, but on its own that's a pretty minor improvement with 1080p content. Antialiasing definitely doesn't clean up everything, but it does a good job of handling particularly large and intrusive aliasing. The results are a far cry from the images Maresille is promoting, but it's a nice effect that does more good than harm. Sometimes the effect seems to make parts of the image more "painted" or "smeared", which is not very good, but the effect is small and depends on the game. Antialiasing works best when scaling is applied. When the mCable is connected to a 1080p display and the source is 480p or 720p, the cable will upscale the image to 1080p and add anti-aliasing, and these two effects together can greatly improve image quality. The scaling solution used here is far superior to what consoles can do on their own, and the anti-aliasing solution here works really well with the larger and more obvious aliasing that results in 480-720p. In these situations, mCable can effectively eliminate most aliasing artifacts from these headers! The improvement here for these games is huge and worth the cost of the cable if you really appreciate these games. It should be noted that since the cable only supports 1080p content, it won't upscale for consoles that are already outputting. in 1080p or upscaled to 1080p. This means that on consoles like the Switch or Xbox 360, where games are often rendered below 1080p and then rendered by the console at 1080p, you will get the best experience with mCable by setting the game rendering resolution (720p) for those consoles . While it still works if you leave the console set to 1080p, you'll get better results if the scaling is done through the cable rather than the console. I'll end this review by showing how effective this cable is on different types of consoles. & content, with the main difference being the rendering resolution of the game, something you really need to keep in mind when making a purchase. The cable works well, but its add-ons have a much greater impact on different types of game content, so its value depends on what you enjoy playing. - Level 4K (PS4 Pro, Xbox One X) - Skip this cable. mCable does not do any signal processing above 1080p. Also, these consoles support relatively high resolutions and more sophisticated anti-aliasing techniques, where mCable doesn't have much impact on de-aliasing on these machines when connected to a 1080p display. Level - 1080p (PS4, Xbox One, some switches) - If anti-aliasing doesn't particularly bother you, I wouldn't use it here either. The anti-aliasing effect can sometimes produce good results, especially when anti-aliasing is really noticeable, but overall the benefit is rather negligible with 1080p content. - Level 720p (Switch, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U) - this is the best place for mCable to improve image quality. Scaling and anti-aliasing working together can greatly improve image quality. In several games at this level (I've tested Super Mario Odyssey and Bayonetta on Switch, MotorStorm Pacific Rift and Devil May Cry HD on PS3, and Ninja Gaiden 2 on 360) aliasing has been effectively removed in each game, resulting in a much smoother look throughout of the game led play. games. is lost with almost no detail. Best results here if you change the resolution setting on the console to Game Rendering Resolution to disable console scaling, which allows mCable to scale to 1080p much better. -480i-480p (Wii, Xbox, PS2, GC) - mCable provides a nice boost for these titles, although you'll still encounter aliasing due to the low native resolution of these titles. Antialiasing removes a significant amount of aliasing and makes what's left look less severe, and the colour/contrast changes work well with the more limited color outputs of these consoles. In order for the mCable to work with these consoles, you need to connect them to an intermediate device that accepts an analogue signal and outputs it via HDMI, which presents an additional hurdle to work with and depending on the device you're using to do this. , your results may vary. Retro Level (NES through PS1/N64) - The source resolution on these devices is too low for mCable to work properly. The end result you get is a bad mix of overly smooth and overly sharp, like a bad version of one of those nasty pixel dithering filters that retro emulators have. You might be able to get good results with some great retro AV gear like the Framemeister or OSSC, but I don't have any of those to test.