US$750 Retrotink 4K upscaler already sold out

The first batch of the upscaler Retrotink 4K is already sold out. Despite the rather high price of US$750 (excluding taxes/import), the device, which has a wide range of uses, appears to have generated enormous demand. According to developer Mike Chi, demand significantly and surprisingly exceeded that of previous products.

Consequently, his website also suffered, sometimes collapsing during orders being made. He has apologized for this and promised that more devices will be on their way soon. According to Chi, a second batch is already in production and should be available in January 2024. But no precise dates have been made.

As things stand, Mike Chi does not want to start a preorder process. He has moral qualms about accepting money for a product that doesn't yet exist.

Retrotink 4K is developed by Mike Chi alone, so it's understandable that the ordering process collapsed due to high demand. Orders via Paypal were apparently the most reliable, as he stated on X (formerly Twitter). But there were also many who reported on social media that the checkout process didn't work.

The upscaler and its powerful Intel Altera FPGA chip, which has even more logic units than Analogue's Pocket or MisterFPGA, offers numerous possibilities of connecting old consoles to modern HDMI televisions and upscaling the image.

Even old PCs from the DOS era can be scaled up to 4K. Thanks to HDMI input, even the first HDMI consoles can be scaled up. The whole thing is extensively configurable and even goes so far so as to allow for old film material to be carefully upscaled at 24 frames per second.