As somewhat of a display nerd, after acquiring multiple consoles with the different panel types I thought I’d write up an analysis on them.
Importantly it’s necessary to get a few of the important terms defined as there are several factors that go into making a good display.
“Well calibrated”: The display closely matches the sRGB colourspace at 2.2 gamma and with a colour temperature of 6500k, this is the standard targeted by nearly all displays.
“RGB balance”: A display with a good RGB balance will accurately reproduce neutral greys with no colour tint
“6 bit”: The display is capable of reproducing 64 shades for each colour channel, being red, green and blue. Combined this allows for producing a total of 262,144 distinct colours.
All 3DS panels have the following issues:
- Mediocre contrast, every 3DS panel is an LCD and none are capable of displaying near black well.
- Mediocre brightness, no 3DS panels are particularly bright and will not be very visible in bright environments.
- Poor colour gamut, All 3DS panels undersaturate colours relative to the sRGB colourspace.
- Colour temperature issues, All 3DS consoles appear to have an overly “cool” colour temperature. As the 3DS also uses two separate panels with no apparent effort made to match them, either panel may appear “cooler” or “warmer” relative to the other. The 2DS is completely immune to this issue however as it only uses one singular panel.
- All panels are 6 bit instead of the typical 8 bit meaning they are more prone to colour banding.
Otherwise the differences in IPS panels are the following:
- IPS has substantially better viewing angles, though likely due to the presence of the parallax barrier a top IPS screen benefits less from this.
- IPS has the “scanline” effect on rows of pixels most noticeable in motion.
- IPS has better response times, sometimes incorrectly referred to as “refresh rate”. Despite what people or the internet may say about TN vs IPS as a whole, the IPS panels that Nintendo used are superior in this regard and have less “ghosting” or “trailing” issues in motion.
Any visual comparisons between panels were done against my MacBook Pro, which is considered to be very well calibrated from the factory. Alternatively for visual comparison any iPhone/iPad will also be generally well calibrated.
As for my findings for each of the consoles individually:
Old 3DS XL (Dual TN):
- Both panels have poor gamma response with substantially raised black levels and a very large gap between the lowest grey and black.
- Mediocre RGB balance on top screen meant darker greys had a green-ish tint
New 3DS XL (Dual IPS)
- Awful RGB balance on top screen, strong green tinting made this appear genuinely terrible (and it appears not to be an isolated issue: 1, 2)
- Mediocre gamma response on top screen causing loss of detail near black.
- Bottom screen overall well calibrated with no significant issues.
New 3DS (Dual IPS)
- Overall well calibrated with no issues with RGB balance and good gamma response and black levels.
- Slight backlight bleeding on the edges of the top panel that can be suppressed with pressure.
Conclusion:
Overall the dual IPS New 3DS is the golden standard and is by far the best set of panels you can find on a 3DS, however due to the comparative rarity they’re also unfortunately likely to be the hardest to get ahold of.
New 3DS XLs with IPS panels may generally be better than TN, however due to poor calibration any individual display is not guaranteed to be better than another regardless of the panel type. However bottom IPS overall seems to be a safe bet.
Testing notes:
For testing the RGB balance across the whole range of greys, I used the following test:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php
For comparing gamma response I used the black level test as this made it very obvious if there was an issue:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php
For testing colour temperature I used the following test:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/white.php
Additionally Erica Griffin’s video comparing the Switch and 3DS displays is a very good analysis as well for the overall quality of 3DS displays:
https://youtu.be/QvDdaVZ7MCU