You all need to remember the target audience of these consoles - Nintendo streamers and children. These people do not care about HDR as much as your traditional PC gamers do. They are going to cut corners to make the console as cheap as possible and only as powerful as needed for their gimmicks to run smoothly.
I dislike the Switch 2 and Nintendo for many reasons, but the lack of good HDR is not one of them.
Edit: realizing after the post this is a Nintendo group, so I am prepared for my downvotes.
Fair, but they’re charging 450$ and advertised HDR, if they’re going to ask that kind of money for an advertised feature, it should be at least decent
Yeah for sure. I’m not going to get one until they make a Switch 2 OLED. I’ve got standards, man.
The one I bought last night is totally going to be my wife’s.
LMAO, yea totally
I bought one too, but it’s going straight to a shelf to stay on launch firmware for the greatest chance for hacking and piracy lol
You’re very mistaken if you think only those two groups of people buy the Switch 2
They said target audience, not the only customers.
I own a large 8k Samsung TV I normally play ps5 on. I don’t think I like HDR is what I’m learning. For my birthday recently I was gifted a ps portal ( I think my wife wants me off the tv lol) the screen honestly looked better than the TV to me. I figure I must have the HDR settings all wrong. I don’t know what else it could be. I think pc gaming in genral likes tinkering, I just like things to work. I was shocked how much better my games looked on this little 1080 screen. It was wild honestly.
I’ll probably pick up a switch 2 because I like Mario Kart. The game will end up looking good enough for me.
Overall I agree with your statement but not the sentiment they are being as cheap as possible. I think they are just recognizing that some stuff doesn’t mater to everyone.
And honestly people pushing graphics above all else miss out on good games anyway.
Why do you dislike the Switch 2?
I feel like people always miss the point of a Nintendo console. While it’d be cool to have HDR and OLED and such, it’s not really a big deal. It doesn’t really impact my ability to have fun with Mario Kart or Party. It doesn’t change my enjoyment of animal crossing, etc.
I’ve got a PS5 hooked to a 4k HDR 120hz screen, and enjoy the performance and graphical fidelity regularly, and there are some games I’m still picking a switch up to play. Heck, I still play on a Wii fairly frequently. The controllers, game types/styles, game quality, accessibility, replayability, etc.
While I somewhat agree with this. If they are advertising something, it should work well.
Well it’s a Nintendo console, so that’s right about where it’s expected to be.
It seems for some reason Nintendo’s in house games’ HDR support seems to be more for increasing accuracy of colours and shapes rather than increasing brightness. Running on my QD OLED monitor, Breath of the Wild’s Switch 2 upgrade does not look super bright with massive contrast (as most PC HDR would be), but you have things like the sun going from a white blob (on an SDR Switch 1 as well as an emulator) to being much more detailed due to the increased gamma value range. On Welcome Tour as well, the fireworks demo definitely shows much more detail in the explosions, but does not use the peak brightness of the monitor. Similarly, Switch 1 games look a bit more muted with the Switch 2’s HDR output (compared to the tone mapping the monitor uses for the Switch 1’s SDR output), but with colours closer to the printed box art and other sources. I think we might see future Nintendo published Switch 2 focused games try and use the HDR for a higher brightness output, or we might see the more accuracy same brightness trend continue. This is likely a development choice, and explains why Cyberpunk 2077 (a game with existing HDR on other platforms, where the tendency is for higher brightness with more “pop” with high contrast) looks quite different in HDR on Switch 2 compared to the Nintendo titles.
The integrated display is definitely not the best thing in the world, but it does what it needs to do pretty well. High refresh rate 1080p with some light HDR looks perfectly fine to me, and it definitely looks far better than Switch 1. It’s very good for my usage. The brightness could have been higher though, considering this is a portable device that you might want to use in bright sunlight on the train or something (high end phone screens get 1000+ nit brightnesses for this reason, and as far as I know Deck OLED does at least 800 or 900).
I’ll be real, I love what Nintendo chose to do with HDR and I wish more companies would follow suit. I hate it when they make the content crazy bright. Tone mapping for SDR games on PC and Steam Deck is notoriously bad, with oranges getting blown out into vibrant reds instead (I love my steam deck but basically have to leave HDR off).
Subtle but higher color accuracy/range was always HDR’s selling point. I’m angry at Nintendo for a lot of things right now, but this is one thing they got right. High quality HDR LCD screen for high longevity and not overturning the colors to blind the hell out of you with “vibrancy.”
