So I had to give this a bump since I visited my buddy and made a discovery playing Switch on his UST.
There are scaling options for low resolution content, and one of the choices is something called “Unscaled”…
Obviously, this had me intrigued. This is a 4k-native projector so I assumed that this meant it would offer a true integer scale to 4k as opposed to an interpolated scale to 4k.
Delightfully, I’m wrong. Instead, it actually offers the content in NATIVE RESOLUTION windowed within a 4k frame buffer with the unused pixels blanked out.
So that means, when you select this mode, you see the Switch’s 1080p output in a smaller window centered within the 4k frame with exactly 1920x1080 pixels being used. The rest of the 4k pixels are simply turned off as a blank boarder.
When you select 720p in the Switch’s settings, the image gets smaller. When you select 480p, the image gets even smaller so that you’re only seeing the native pixels.
But you may be thinking, “Peltz, what the hell use is having a native res image if it’s rendered the size of a postage stamp?”
Well, that’s where we get into the true beauty of this discovery. Because this is a projector, you can simply move the device further away from the wall, and the image can be as large as you want it to be at whatever resolution you may be projecting.
Boom.
You can have a perfect native 480p image at 60+ inches by doing this.
I have not tried a 15khz signal (i.e. 240p/480i) since I have no device capable of converting that into HDMI which is the only connection type that the projector can accept.
But for 480p up to 4k gaming, I’ve confirmed you can do so natively with RAZOR SHARP visuals as long as you don’t mind physically moving the device to get the perfect sized image.
Now with that said, moving the device and having it perfectly aligned with the screen is no simple task. If it’s sitting on top of a media unit, you’ll have to move the entire media unit.
But folks… if you can find the right table (ideally a motorized height-adjustable standing desk with castors that can lock in place), this is basically like having a retrotink 4k built right into the device. And in game mode, the system is acceptably responsive even if not at the LG OLED or CRT levels to which most of us are accustomed.
I really wish I could test this out with 15khz content, because if it can recognize sub 480p signals properly, this could be a really faithful way to play the lowest res content at very large sizes.
Perhaps in the age of a retrotink4k, this isn’t as big of a discovery as it would have been 2-3 years ago. But I still think this is a really cool feature that I never expected to see in a consumer display.