Switch OLED review: Nintendo’s nicest, most nonessential upgrade yet

For all the portable game systems Nintendo has launched, including mid-generation revisions, few have included cutting-edge upgrades to a key element: the screen.

Historically, Nintendo has been in the back of the pack when compared to competitors' screens. The Game Boy's panels suffered heavy ghosting and lacked backlighting, for instance; they were handily surpassed in their time by the likes of the Game Gear and the Lynx. Only now, with no other dedicated handheld console to beat (for at least two months, anyway), has Nintendo offered a screen that made me say "wow."

This screen comes on the Nintendo Switch OLED, a model going on sale later this week. Rumors previously suggested that the Switch OLED would run existing games better, in one way or another, but that didn't pan out (or at least not yet). Instead, this week's new Switch OLED runs existing games on the same Nvidia Tegra X1 chipset. It copies the original portable/docked hybrid concept so well that you can use the new Switch with existing Joy-Cons, TV docks, and carrying cases.

The result—a larger, more beautiful screen and little else of import—is a tough recommendation for some Nintendo fans, but it will be a must-buy for others.

The list says a lot

Let's start with a list of every difference between the original Switch and the new Switch OLED, because it may serve as review enough for some interested shoppers.

• 11 percent larger screen than standard Switch
• 4.8 percent heavier than standard Switch
• Roughly equivalent battery life to the "1.1" Switch refresh
• Screen now uses OLED technology (upgrade from existing models' LCD panels)
• Exclusive "vivid" toggle while playing in portable mode
• Roughly double the built-in storage space, up from 32GB to 64GB
• A larger, firmer "tabletop" hinge
• TV dock now includes built-in Ethernet port

If some feature you've dreamed of isn't in that list, it isn't in the Switch OLED, which retails for $349.99 (with an included TV dock). That's $50 more than the standard Nintendo Switch (which also comes with a dock) and $150 more than the portable-only, no-dock Switch Lite.

If you were blindfolded and handed either dockable Switch model, you'd only notice two major differences between their otherwise identical form factors. First, Switch OLED is a scant 20 g heavier, and all of that weight comes from the body itself; the detachable Joy-Con controllers look, feel, and weigh the same. They even have the same model number (HAC-016). If the new Switch includes any particular hardware revisions to fix "Joy-Con drift," Nintendo isn't formally acknowledging them. (I didn't run into Joy-Con drift with these after only one week of use, for what that's worth.)

The other difference you'd notice while blindfolded is the feel of the new aluminum hinge that stretches across half of Switch OLED's backside, where your nontrigger fingers will likely rest. I'll get to the hinge's usefulness in a bit. For now, as a material against your hands, it's a welcome upgrade. I'm a big fan of the slightly cool touch of aluminum on a mobile device, and once Switch OLED has been running for about 10 minutes, its aluminum more evenly distributes the console's accumulating heat than the previous model's largely plastic makeup. (The system still mostly relies on plastic, though).

A great steward for handheld action

Otherwise, this new model still feels very Switch-y. The console's removable Joy-Cons fit flush against the new Switch, just like they did with its predecessor, instead of having any sort of mismatch. If you loved or hated how Switch feels in handheld mode, the difference in weight and material likely won't sway you.

Once you remove your blindfold, of course, the biggest upgrade becomes abundantly clear.

This system crams an 11.4 percent larger screen (7 inches, compared to 6.2 inches in the launch model) into the same form factor. This is entirely thanks to a reduction in bezels. This nearly end-to-end wrap of pixels across Switch OLED's front face is quite handsome, and its bezels are even smaller than the small ones on the Switch Lite (if only by a hair).

Switch OLED's panel still has a 720 p resolution, however, which is scant compared to what you'd expect from a seven-inch smartphone screen in 2021. Yet the jump in size doesn't produce apparent pixellation or smeariness. Whether playing a pixel-crisp retro platformer, an optimized 3D game, or even lower-resolution ports of graphical beasts like the Witcher 3, Switch OLED does its handheld action justice.

Putting the “OLED” in “Switch OLED”

This improvement is largely due to Nintendo's jump to OLED technology. When I previously wrote at length about OLED, that was about its use in expensive TVs, not portable devices like game consoles and phones. Still, my prior explainer will catch you up on OLED's general benefits over LCD, and it sums up a lot of what Switch OLED gets right. In particular, OLED delivers more vivid colors and the gorgeous effect of an "infinite contrast ratio," since its pixels can fully turn off and thus look entirely black.

Unlike newer OLED devices on the market, particularly TVs and compatible smartphones, Switch OLED misses out on the world of "HDR" (which I've also written about at length). All of Switch OLED's tone mapping aligns with the more dated "SDR" standard of color and luminance data. Hey, fair enough: Switch games don't currently support HDR tone mapping anyway. Still, it's an important distinction if you assume "OLED" always comes with certain bells and whistles.

Many OLED panels on smartphones arrange their pixels in "PenTile" fashion to save energy. Since green-colored pixels sip energy more slowly, you'll see more of them on PenTile arrangements. The caveat is that those pixels are smaller. Blue pixels, though, are bigger, but not as many are built in. On paper, that means you're getting the "same" amount of red, blue, and green data in your RGB color spreads, but in practice, the results can look more imprecise or jagged.

Nintendo opts for the arguably less-efficient OLED square pixel layout. This was clearly the right decision in terms of visual quality. And I honestly can't recall Nintendo ever going this route with a portable device before. When I mentioned that green pixels use less energy, you may have immediately recalled the original Game Boy's notoriously green panel, which Nintendo chose for power considerations.

Lotteries and vivid mode

Nintendo's previous portable consoles have suffered from something known as the "panel lottery," where quality and color balance can vary based on which factory the device came from. You can even see this on Nintendo Switch; I say this as the owner of two dockable Switch models. My older launch model has more balanced tones on its screen, while my newer one is gaudier with noticeably orange tones.

How that will play out for Switch OLED remains unclear as of press time, since I've only looked at one piece of hardware. Also, OLED panels simply cannot be controlled at the factory level as well as LCD ones in terms of default color balance—a fact that has made "universal" calibration settings for OLED TVs impractical. But my own Switch OLED hews much closer to my launch Switch screen—a little cooler, all things told, in its default mode.

Switch OLED also includes a "vivid" mode toggle in its menus, which splits the difference between cooler and warmer tones by delivering a bit of both: bright whites still look whiter, not sickly yellow, while other color extremes look bold without bleeding into neighboring pixels. This isn't quite a faked HDR effect but rather a color-calibration option that will largely be up to player preference. I recommend opening a colorful Nintendo classic like Mario Kart, then playing a familiar racetrack with both modes and deciding which fits your preferences.

Good news on the battery front

So how does the new screen impact battery life? Surprisingly, not much.

Though I've yet to grab my Torx screwdrivers and spudgers to pop this Switch OLED model open, I wouldn't be shocked to learn its additional 20 g of weight is entirely due to a bigger battery to keep up with the larger OLED panel's power demands. Despite needing to light up a bigger panel, Switch OLED's battery somehow lasts about 3.3 percent longer than the "1.1" Switch model when set to equivalent brightness with Wi-Fi enabled. (The 1.1 was introduced in 2019 with its own bigger battery.)

My testing revolved around a moment in Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD when I could position the hero Link against a short wall, such that pressing the joystick toward the wall meant he didn't move. This spot also included a clear look at flaming particle effects and a few animated objects in the distance. All this was near a save point so that I could easily reproduce the same testing environment. I then secured the joystick with a rubber band so that it remained depressed, thus preventing either Switch model from going into a default "sleep" state of slightly reduced brightness. The below results are measured in hours, minutes, and seconds.

• Switch OLED: 5:47:42
• Switch 1.1: 5:36:30

A discussion on retention

Because this is an OLED panel on a game system, we must talk about one potential concern: image retention.

OLED panels' pixels can become stuck if static images remain on screen for long periods of time—though this plays out less as a classic "burn-in" of game text and icons and more of a grainy effect that is most noticeable over solid bands of color. Newer OLED TVs have improved this by including mild pixel-shifting options as a default preventative measure, along with optional "screen wipe" functions.

But Switch OLED doesn't appear to include built-in preventative measures while playing in portable mode. There are no menu toggles for things like pixel shifting, and the system's "sleep" mode simply dims the console's screen if button input hasn't been registered for five minutes. Worse, Nintendo absolutely buries a brand-new warning about this in its pamphlet—and nowhere else on the box. You can find the warning between a bunch of other rote recommendations about, say, not spilling liquids on your Switch.

Here's the text:

To minimize the risk of image retention or screen burn-in occurring on the OLED screen, do not turn off the system's default sleep mode settings, and take care to not display the same image on the OLED screen for extended periods of time.

That warning offers little to help with any game that has persistent UI elements—particularly classic games on Nintendo Switch Online's NES or SNES collections. Worse, any games in those collections include mandatory screen borders, covered in pixel patterns, to block out their original 4:3 ratios. These cannot be disabled, despite years of fan complaints about them.

Getting to the bottom of pixel noise

As I described, my battery-test scenario required keeping the Switch on with a button direction held down in order to disable the automatic screen-dimming feature. During this hours-long test, the game's on-screen elements remained relatively static, ranging from world geometry like cliffs and ledges to Zelda images like a health bar and inventory icons.

Once I recharged and rebooted my Switch OLED, I immediately noticed apparent pixel noise, primarily when I had the system's "dark theme" enabled. I could use a system function to "zoom" in to the system menus and then move their text elements around. Here, a grainy sheen was abundantly clear through the mostly gray screen. Instead of an even, flat screen full of the same shade of gray, I saw speckling, almost as if someone saved an all-gray image as a badly compressed JPG.

Was this due to image retention? I wasn't sure. Unlike burn-in on older plasma TVs, none of the usual Zelda UI elements remained fixed on the screen (e.g., hearts, inventory icons). Yet it seemed like some of the virtual world's lines and patterns had possibly gotten stuck, or it seemed that way when I went back and forth between the flat, gray screen and the Zelda moment I'd used in my battery benchmark. A slight speckling line seemed to line up with the edge of a cliff—that sort of thing.

Pixel purging

The next morning, I conducted a brute-force attempt to purge any retained pixels. This required loading an all-white screen capture in the gallery interface with on-screen UI disabled for 15 minutes. After that, I noticed reduced noise, but some fixed graininess remained on the screen. Again, the graininess was most noticeable with a full gray menu screen, not within games themselves. As I talked about my process with Ars colleagues, however, I became more convinced that the issue wasn't OLED image retention. It was the OLED display itself.

We'll learn more as teardowns emerge once the console goes live, and we're particularly interested in learning who supplied the first round of OLED panels for this Switch revision. We've seen certain suppliers earn a reputation for uneven, grainy OLED panels, most noticeable in all-gray images. (My colleague Ron Amadeo talks about this at length in his 2017 review of the Pixel 2 line of smartphones.) So I tested a Switch game that might emphasize such an issue: Hollow Knight, a modern 2D classic that involves giant swaths of gray and blue. I was delighted to see that this Switch OLED panel's potential graininess was hardly perceptible, even in its dark scenes full of solid chunks of dark coloring. Plus, as a dark and moody game, Hollow Knight benefited enormously from the OLED panel's infinite contrast ratio.

When asked about my image retention scare, a Nintendo representative forwarded the following statement:

We've designed the OLED screen to aim for longevity as much as possible, but OLED displays can experience image retention if subjected to static visuals over a long period of time. However, users can take preventative measures to preserve the screen by utilizing features included in the Nintendo Switch systems by default, such as an auto-brightness function to prevent the screen from getting too bright and the auto-sleep function to go into "auto sleep" mode after short periods of time.

Sign up for this hinge

Let's return to Switch OLED's redesigned hinge, since it goes hand in hand with a bigger primary screen. Nintendo clearly wants its audience to reconsider "tabletop" mode as an option. I don't know about you, but I sure haven't been propping my Switch up on its original paper-thin hinge to shoot virtual hoops between real-life basketball games over the past four years.

Does Switch OLED get us closer to recreating Nintendo's dopey 2017 commercials? Somewhat. The redesigned hinge, now nearly as wide as the Switch itself, gains serious stability over the 0.75-inch hinge on the original. Its range of articulation exceeds 135 degrees, and it firms up at every arbitrary angle. This is particularly nice if you want the Switch to stand up almost entirely straight since, again, the very wide hinge means it enjoys more support by default.

When propped up on a table, 11 percent more screen real estate is nothing to sneeze at if you want to use your Switch OLED on a plane, at the gym, or at a bar—any situation where you might prefer to put the screen down and hold only the Joy-Cons. You can simulate this yourself by printing and taping a full seven-inch screen facsimile over your current Switch. I recommend making it a big Mario Kart or Breath of the Wild image.

Plus, in terms of screen quality and color calibration, you have to spend a pretty penny to get a larger gaming screen that looks this good. That's not necessarily a reason to squint at a seven-inch screen in favor of whatever's already mounted on your wall, but it's a decent consolation prize if you're left doing so.

If, on the other hand, you were hoping for greatly improved speakers to max out a tabletop gaming session, you won't find them here. My cursory microphone test of both Switch consoles resulted in both systems apparently delivering the same volume, and I didn't notice any particularly improved audio compared to the launch Switch model (though it's better than the smaller speaker built into Switch Lite).

Dock on the docket

The Switch's new dock gains a dedicated Ethernet adapter, which comes at the cost of one of its USB Type-A ports. (The original Switch TV dock has three of those ports, while the updated one only has two.) As I've never had a reason to connect more than two USB cables to a Switch at once, I'm fine with that trade, especially since it means the dock gets a more elegant way to connect an Ethernet cable.

The new dock's built-in Ethernet adapter appears to work identically to the $15 USB adapter I'd previously used on an older Switch dock. But so long as most Switch games involve gut-wrenchingly bad netcode and a predominately Wi-Fi-connected playerbase, it's all moot, as far as I'm concerned.

Switch OLED's dock also includes a slightly redesigned back plastic face, which now pops off entirely instead of staying attached via a handy hinge. I'm not sure what was wrong with the attached hinge option of old. It wasn't particularly fancy to begin with, but this feels like a dollar-store option in comparison. If you constantly move your Switch TV dock from room to room, I recommend that you stick with an existing dock.