Months of rumours and leaks meant that yesterday's announcement that Nintendo Switch 2 will come with an LCD screen wasn't all that big of a surprise. We had been preparing to say goodbye to the OLED for a while now, but Nintendo is keen to point out that the change isn't a decision that the team took lightly.
During a roundtable discussion with Kouichi Kawamoto, Takuhiro Dohta and Tetsuya Sasaki at yesterday's Nintendo Switch 2 hands-on event in New York, Sasaki admitted that "There's been a lot of advancement that has been made in LCD screen technology" since the release of the Switch 1, and the team "took a look at the LCD technology that is available to us now" during Switch 2 development.
"After a lot of consideration," Sasaki continued, "we decided to stick with LCD".
Fortunately, there are a handful of features that the Switch 2 has up its sleeve to outpace its OLED predecessor. "Even with the OLED version of Nintendo Switch, we didn't have HDR," Sasaki pointed out, "but that's something we have support for now".
Without trying to agree too wholeheartedly with the console devs, we have to admit that we're fully on board with this point. Playing about with modern LCD screens on devices like the PlayStation Portal reveals a level of quality that simply wasn't available to the OG Switch eight years ago. Sure, those blacks might not be quite as inky as they would be on an OLED, but this is far from the downgrade you might have thought it was.