The new Nintendo Switch OLED comes with a prettier screen, but not much else to encourage existing owners to upgrade.
Nintendo finally pulled back the curtain on its mid-gen Nintendo Switch refresh, and it’s ingeniously called the Nintendo Switch OLED. Not the Nintendo Switch Pro, like so many speculated, but the Nintendo Switch OLED. Why? Well, because it comes with a 7-inch OLED screen, of course, which should make Switch games look more vibrant and alluring when played in handheld and tabletop mode. It’s also slightly larger than the 6.2-inch display of the original, so competitive games of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe when played in tabletop mode should feel less cramped. The new display is a huge plus, then, as anyone who has seen an OLED screen in action can testify how its inky blacks and superior contrast ratios make it one of the best display technologies around. Nintendo’s artstyle and bold color palette will also lend itself wonderfully to the punchy picture quality an OLED display can provide, too. But what about the rest of the Switch OLED’s package? Well, there’s more to be annoyed about than pleased, with five standout issues that make Nintendo’s new $349.99 / £309 / AU$539 machine a hard sell to anyone but new adopters. It ultimately begs the question, then: who is the Nintendo Switch OLED really for? One of the most widely suggested rumors about a Nintendo Switch upgrade was that the console would output at 4K resolution when docked. And honestly, that made total sense.4K has become the standard for most households these days, and Switch games tend to look noticeably soft when outputting at 1080p on larger displays. Surely, then, Nintendo’s new Switch outputs at 4K? Well, no. Amazingly, in 2021, we’ll still be bound to a resolution of 1080p when playing Switch on a TV, which feels horribly outdated when 4K TVs offer quadruple the pixels of 1080p. Yes, Nintendo would have had to probably update its software to support higher resolutions, but the results would have been extremely impressive. Just look how good Mario Kart 8 Deluxe looks running at 4K in the video below. It’s a real shame that the Switch OLED can’t output or at least upscale to 4K when connected to a TV, then, something which the Xbox One S was able to do when it launched back in 2013. I guess we’ll have to wait for the Nintendo Switch 2 before Ultra HD comes to a Nintendo system. With no 4K output on the new Switch, it’s less of a surprise that running games on the Switch OLED won’t result in any tangible improvement to a game’s framerate or graphical quality, but it certainly would have been welcomed.
