Steam Deck OLED vs. Steam Deck LCD vs. Switch OLED: How They All Stack Up

ign.com:

Over a year after first announcing its first handheld gaming PC, Valve has revealed the Steam Deck OLED – a new iteration with an improved display, better audio, and greater battery life, to name a few of the big changes.

While it is not the Steam Deck 2 everyone has been hoping for, plenty of significant changes warrant this upgrade one year into the handheld’s lifespan. To see how the Steam Deck OLED stacks up with the competition, we are going to take a look at the specs and features and go over some standout differences between the Steam Deck OLED, the launch model, and the Nintendo Switch OLED:

Let’s get the big one out of the way: Steam Deck OLED ditches the LCD on the original model in favor of an OLED display. Much like the Switch LCD vs the Switch OLED, these displays have different methods to light up and display an image. While Steam Deck OLED offers no bump in performance over the LCD model, the display will provide an improved image quality, delivering deeper blacks, better contrast, and increased brightness.

The Steam Deck OLED and Nintendo Switch OLED on paper sound like two sides of a similar coin, but the key difference between these two devices (aside from the fact one is a hybrid game console and the other is a handheld PC) is that the updated Steam Deck model features a High Dynamic Range (HDR) OLED display. Simply put, the HDR OLED display gives a more dynamic picture by offering a more comprehensive range of colors and contrasts found in a standard OLED display; think of HDR OLED as making the image quality just a bit shinier and brighter than what you usually expect from an OLED display.

As you can see from the infographic above, the Steam Deck OLED also offers a higher refresh rate than the Steam