I have owned and regularly used a steam deck LCD for over a year. A few days ago my oled steam deck arrived. Unfortunately my experience was not nearly as flawless and great as most Reviewers make it out to be. Basically there are two main issues I have with it
1: the abxy buttons and d-pad feel much more mushy than the old one, have no click to them at all and they are manufactured with such inconsistency and high tolerance that they audibly rattle around whenever I move the steam deck around. At first I thought there where loose parts inside but it turns out there are not and it’s just the buttons and d-pad rattling around because they aren’t properly attached and they are much smaller (if I had to guess the dpad is about 1-2mm smaller measured from end to end) than the old ones but the holes for them in the chassis remain the same which is part of what causes them to rattle.
2: the oled screen has a very bad case of “mura” which is as far as I know a issue with oled that is at least common enough that you can read about it on online. Basically all the pixels are not the same brightness due to manufacturing inconsistency and bad calibration which leads to a grainy inconsistent picture. It looks like there is always a very strong film grain filter on everything. And no it’s not one game I was testing that has a film grain filter that I didn’t disable, from the second it boots up and you see the startup movie you can see it and you can also see it in all the menus and even in desktop mode. This effect is not to be confused with “screen door effect” which can sometimes look similar but is caused by there being big black gaps between the individual pixels. I got a 512gb Version with a Samsung screen. The LCD steam deck does not have any similar effect, besides it being slightly smaller, 60hz and having back light problems, which are more rarely a issue than a permanent film grain like filter that basically ruins most scenes that aren’t just black, to me it looks much better than the oled screen. (I am colorblind so the better colors of the oled don’t matter to me)
Conclusion: I feel like the oled steam deck is massively oversold by most reviewers since I have not seen anyone talk about the mushy controller buttons or the bad parts about the screen yet. In my opinion it is much more of a sidegrade than a actual improvement. It’s not even much more quiet than my LCD steam deck, under the same load they sound about the same. The oled runs at about 60c and the LCD at 80c tho so if they improved the Fan curve and bring the oled closer to 80c or more they could improve the noise output substantially. You trade better battery life and slightly less noisy fan for much worse mushy controls. And in my opinion the screen is also a sidegrade not a upgrade, you just trade a higher refresh rate and better blacks and slight size increase for a permanent heavy film grain filter that you can’t do anything about. At least if you are bothered by the bad blacks of the LCD you aren’t bothered in games that don’t or rarely show complete blacks. All these bad parts about it make me actually prefer playing on the LCD steam deck.
I’m thinking it’s not mentioned in reviews because a lot of units don’t have these issues, or it’s not a big enough problem to bother most journalists.
I don’t see the mura effect on my 1TB OLED at all. Nor do I notice any fringing. I mean I don’t play games with my face right up against the screen, so maybe that’s why. I guess I also don’t expect a device like this to have a 100% perfect screen either, esp. at this price point. I suppose if it was made for productivity like professional graphics work it would be a serious issue. Thankfully it’s not.
The buttons are a tiny bit loose on mine, but they don’t rattle like crazy when handled normally. No sticking X or B buttons either. Nothing feels overly mushy either. In fact the D-pad is noticeably clickier than my 512GB LCD. So I think we can chalk those up to defects, or being at the far end of allowable factory tolerances?
I mean if you’re not happy with your unit you can return it to Valve. And either take another shot at getting another one to see if these things improve, or just stick to the older model until the next major revision rolls out.
I don’t have these issues, certainly not the buttons.
Also, would you rather have this ‘mura’ or the LCD backlight bleed? Genuine question.
I’ll compare my LCD with my OLED once back home and come back to you. So far I’m loving the OLED screen. My LCD has back bleed and way too much ghosting during camera movement than I’d prefer. Colours coverage is also worse on LCD. I haven’t noticed anything wrong with controls, I’ll compare them and let you know how they feel. At the moment I can’t think of any lack in quality. The battery in OLED is way better, OLED is also quieter and runs cooler. In my case, subjectively, OLED is a huge improvement.
The screen issues I understand since its new but how they messed up controller parts on it when they had that figured out with the LCD model by now.
They didn’t.
I think you just got a bad device my dude.
RMA it and try again.
This version of the deck is on par with the old one and slightly better in some spots than the old one, but it is in no way a downgrade from the LCD.
Its a great looking screen. But. This model clearly has quality control problems. That is just a fact at this point. I have shitty audio and dead pixel. For almost 600 bucks, absolutely no thanks Valve. The pixel I could probably live with. The hissing audio on a portable device… Gimme a break.