CES 2016

You’ve heard it a hundred times before…”All HDMI cables are the same.” Essentially, if you can see an image on the screen that is lacking in sparklies, or doesn’t flash in-and-out, then your HDMI cable is every bit as good as it needs to be. Well, Marseille is looking to change the game with its new mCable, the only HDMI cable that is designed to improve picture quality.

I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical about the cable at first. When I heard that this HDMI cable was upscaling video from 480p/720p to 1080p and 1080p to 4K I figured, “Meh.” The fact is that you probably own three or four devices already that do upscaling between your Blu-ray player, cable or satellite STB, AV receiver and then inside the TV itself. How could an upscaling chip inside an HDMI cable compete with this?

However the upscaling is just a small part of what this active HDMI cable does. It also performs detail enhancement, edge restoration, color management, artifact removal and is Technicolor certified. I watched some side-by-side images of native images and then “enhanced” via mCable images and the results were always visible and I didn’t notice any glaring artifacts or detrimental issues in my short time looking at the demo. The company pointed out that their product doesn’t perform any de-interlacing, so it passes any non-progressive—480i, 1080i—signals through untouched. This saves them a lot of processing and allows them to focus on other areas.

While there are currently no settings or adjustments possible—it is simply plug and play, powered from USB at the display side—the company shared that it would be possible to allow for some user tweaks to the image processing.

mCable is shipping now in various lengths at prices starting around $130.