Naked Snake
Member
Erica Griffin is a nerd and very picky when it comes to display quality and color calibration. I always appreciated her smartphone reviews containing a very detailed section just analyzing the screens. She did a video a while back about 3DS TN vs IPS (and variations within), and now she's done one on Switch vs New 3DS XL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvDdaVZ7MCU
Switch screen can display full sRGB color gamut. 3DS doesn't come close:
3DS display severely lacks saturation in Reds (and some Blues), easy to see in skin-tones:
Switch screen has good calibration, black levels and contrast ratio (over 1000:1)
Nice colors that are not over saturated or have strange hue as on 3DS:
Though colors have a bit of a cool tone:
But 3DS is much worse:
Decent Gamma:
Good gray scale:
Brighter than 3DS XL (near 400 nits vs less than 200):
She mentions possible variations between units, but in her anecdotal experience it seems to be much more consistent than 3DS in that regard. I have also personally compared several Switch units and 3DS ones and found this to be the case.
Her overall score of the displays:
Switch: 9-9.5 out of 10
3DS: 4-5 out of 10 (depending if you get IPS or not)
PS: at the end she says something I'm not sure I understood correctly, but I think the gest of it is not to use the Switch "browser" video streaming to judge colors because they're not right (e.g. watching Youtube through current methods). Here's a comparison of the colors between Youtube on Switch (in its current unofficial form) and the same image on a webpage.
Kudos to Nintendo. You done good this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvDdaVZ7MCU
Switch screen can display full sRGB color gamut. 3DS doesn't come close:
3DS display severely lacks saturation in Reds (and some Blues), easy to see in skin-tones:
Switch screen has good calibration, black levels and contrast ratio (over 1000:1)
Nice colors that are not over saturated or have strange hue as on 3DS:
Though colors have a bit of a cool tone:
But 3DS is much worse:
Decent Gamma:
Good gray scale:
Brighter than 3DS XL (near 400 nits vs less than 200):
She mentions possible variations between units, but in her anecdotal experience it seems to be much more consistent than 3DS in that regard. I have also personally compared several Switch units and 3DS ones and found this to be the case.
Her overall score of the displays:
Switch: 9-9.5 out of 10
3DS: 4-5 out of 10 (depending if you get IPS or not)
PS: at the end she says something I'm not sure I understood correctly, but I think the gest of it is not to use the Switch "browser" video streaming to judge colors because they're not right (e.g. watching Youtube through current methods). Here's a comparison of the colors between Youtube on Switch (in its current unofficial form) and the same image on a webpage.
Kudos to Nintendo. You done good this time.