Lab – Nintendo Switch 2: Why abandon the OLED for the LCD may disappoint players

It was a rail pushed in unison during the presentation video of the Nintendo Switch 2: a LCD screen, really? While OLED technology has become more democratized over the years on the nomadic tech market, computer telephony, it seems curious – who said retrograde? – To see Nintendo happening for its new portable console.

A choice for the economy, or simply pragmatic to offer a potential future more expensive iteration? Anyway, the evil is done: no question of hoping for infinite contrasts or absent remanence, as on the OLED model of the first switch of the name. However, should we really hope for the worst with the slab of this Switch 2?

And the light was …

After passing our usual test battery for portable consoles, it would almost come the drive to compare it directly to the very first version of the Switch. From 2017 to 2025, the difference is logically marked and it would be easy to see a total success. Except that in fact, the screen of the Switch 2 still leaves something to be desired in the face of its competition.

Take for example the thought rate. Measured with our reflectometer on three different angles (20 °, 65 ° and 85 °), we learn that the Switch 2 returns 54.1 % of the surrounding lighting. It is half less than the switch “OG”, a true mirror at 97 % reflected light, as we had once measured. However, his direct successor is doing less well than the OLED switch with an average of 49 %. It’s just enough to play in an open space or an office with a little too pale lights, but not enough to enjoy the last Mario Kart In full sun without folding a minimum eyes.

Can we expect maximum brightness high enough to compensate for these capricious reflections? On this point, the Nintendo Switch 2 actually does better than its elders. In SDR mode, we noted a maximum brightness of 390 cd/m², a little more than the classic switch (360 CD/m²) and OLED (330 CD/M²)… It is nevertheless miles from the Steam Deck OLED (600 CD/M²) or the MSI CLAW AI 8+ (493 CD/M²), to name a few. Remember that these are the measures made in SDR mode, while waiting to be able to establish the measurement (potentially higher) with the activated HDR mode.

Marcel, lights the heating (and the Nintendo Switch 2)

Okay, the brightness is good, but what about the calibration of the screen? This is perhaps the big black point in our lab: the SWITCH 2 slab displays color temperatures far too high at 8778 K, far from the platonic ideal of the 6,500 K. Be careful, which says high color temperatures does not say more “warm” colors, but a highlighting of blue until certain shades of white, gray and ecru, all the more obvious compared to the screen (7367 k).

It is a constant, it would seem, on the market of portable consoles, surely explained by the preference (fabricated?) Of gamers For a cold colorimetric space. In theory, a patch applying a new colorimetric profile in the future is possible, but we doubt very strongly the will of Nintendo to change anything on this aspect of hardware.

As for the Delta E standard, which makes it possible to measure the “precision” of the colors displayed on the screen, the Switch 2 falls into a relatively mediocre average of 3.6, without surprise the threshold of 3 from which the colorimetric drifts are visible to the naked eye. It is a disappointing score, all the more compared to the OLED Switch (1.8 in standard mode), or even the classic switch (3.2).

Let’s finish our analysis on a good note. The persistence (or persistence of the image) on the screen does not exceed here 8 ms, a very honorable time for an LCD slab. Logically, the console does not make the weight in the face of the almost instantaneous response times of the OLED, but its contrast was measured with a ratio of 1119: 1, that is better than that of the classic Switch (1083: 1). Small victories count!