hey guys Taki here I've been playing on my steam
deck non-stop since I got it and I've tried to answer as many questions as I could along the way
but there's one question that I couldn't answer until today and that is how the more expensive
steam Deck with the edge glass compares to the glossy screen OLED steam deck in this video
we're going to do a deep dive into this topic to hopefully put this entire thing to rest before
we open this up and start getting into the meat of this video in the interest of full transparency
valve sent this deck to me I reached out to them to ask if they could help sh a deck to me if
I bought it on the official website because I live in a country where you can't get this
and they just replied saying that they would send one to me they did not need to do that and
that is extremely generous of them and there we have it the glossy OLED steam deck I've spent a
lot of time with my etch glass OLED steam deck so if there is a big difference here I should
definitely be able to find it after finishing up that update process this is what the deck
looks like if we head over to system settings you can see that we're on 3.5.5 I think 3.5
5.6 is also out right now but that is on the beta Channel this is the newest version for the
stable Channel at this point I could go through and set up this deck like I normally would but
there is a faster method that I want to take advantage of for this video we're going to start
off by turning off the steam deck then I'm going to put this in the case that it came with and
I'm going to take off this back shell the main difference between this deck and the original
is that they now use torque screws it's not as convenient as the original but you will need to
use a t7 bit to open this up on my one terab OLED deck these screws felt a bit tighter than they
do here these ones aren't giving me any issues with the back screws all off we can now move
over to taking off the back shell with a prying tool with that entire back shell off now we can
start working on the SSD the first thing that I'm going to do is remove the battery by pulling out
this tab and then I'm going take off this Shield just like the backshell this also uses torque
screws this is not completely necessary but I'm also going to remove this ribbon cable over here
on the left left side and I'm also going to take out this speaker connector now we have access to
the SSD and this also uses a torque screw in case anyone was wondering here's a closeup look at the
512 GB SSD at this point you have two different paths you can take depending on your situation if
you already own a steam deck you can take out the drive from that deck and put it into this one
and as long as it's been updated to the latest version it should work with no problem for example
here's the 512 GB SSD from my Gundam deck and it has already been updated to 3.5.5 or 3 5.6 this
is not the option that I'm going to go with but I just want to demonstrate how easy this is I
can put my Gundam SSD into this deck and then turn it on and then I can put my new SSD into my
Gundam deck and I can keep it as is or I could resell it with that new SSD in with that drive
installed this should just boot up without any issues and as you can see everything works
just fine if I go into the system settings to see the version you can see this is on 3.5.6
and that's because this deck was on the beta Channel now this drive swap is the process that
I would take if I was planning on selling my old original steam Deck with the 512 GB card that
came with this OLED model but there's another path that you can take and that's what I plan on
doing in this video I'm going to take that SSD from my gunam deck and I'm going to clone it so
that way I can have two decks running the exact same software for this process you're going to
want to have access to an m.2 to USB adapter I have three different kinds here these are usually
pretty cheap and either one of these can get the job done when it comes to Drive cloning there
are a few different ways you can go about doing this including doing the entire process on the
deck itself I'm going to go with Windows and I'm going to use Rufus to make a copy of my
steam deck SSD that I can reuse in the future this is simple but you do have to have enough
free storage to hold an image of your drive after that's done we can insert the drive that we
want Flash and Rufus will take care of everything for us if you're doing this with a bigger drive
like I am this entire process can take a bit of time to complete but it should work well it took
longer than I thought it would but we're finally done now we can go ahead and assemble this again
all right I'm going to stop just short of putting on the back shell because I want to address
a topic that I haven't talked about yet and that is compatibility with third- party shells I
got shells from two different companies for this and then hopefully give you some idea of what you
can expect so the first one is this JX back plate this one has a big piece of metal right here
that is supposed to have a conductive rubber pad on the back but I removed that when I used
this on my normal steam deck this one fits no problem on this but I would need to do a lot more
testing to find out how this impacts The Thermals of this because this is not the same platform as
the original device we also have another type of shell that doesn't try to do anything different
it's just like an OEM replacement this one is from extreme rate it doesn't have that metal plate
here and this one also fits perfectly on the deck I think J Sox also makes a case like this that
doesn't have that metal plate here between the two Styles I think this is the safer bet with this
updated platform however not all shells will work this is the RGB back plate that JX also makes
and it has a battery module right here in the corner that conflicts with these components over
here on the top you could still use this without the RGB functionality if you wanted by removing
that PCB but that kind of defeats the purpose and that just leaves us with front shell mods
and from everything that I can see here those should still work all the mounting holes are in
the same position but I think some of the inserts for the torque screws would be a bit challenging
so I expect that we'll see a revision of these shells in the near future I also think it's highly
likely that one of the companies is going to come out with a clone of the limited edition OLED
model that being said I don't think I would do this mod on an OLED deck as you probably
know I did that shell mod with this Atomic purple one but that was with the cheapest steam
deck from the original lineup and I don't know that I would do that again with my own money on a
$550 steam deck or a $650 steam deck that's just too risky I was rocking this Atomic purple shell
for a while and I only just recently switched it over to this allwhite shell that I think looks
amazing if I was going to do a shell swap on on an OLED deck it would probably just be to
this white shell anyway here's the moment of truth and I got to say after spending all that
time doing the drive cloning I'm very happy to see that this worked without issue if we go into
the settings now and then down to the OS version you can see that I'm on 3.5.6 because this is
the version that was on the Gundam steam deck that I cloned and just to make it a bit easier
to distinguish which deck we're looking at at any given time for from this point forward this
glossy OLED deck will have these slip covers on Now that we have this all set, we are almost
ready to start doing some meaningful tests on this new OLED Steam Deck. But we have to take
care of something first. If you weren't aware, people discovered that there are two suppliers
for the OLED screen in the new Steam Deck by looking over the code. One of them is from Samsung
and the other one is from a company called BOE. Before we can move forward, it is
important that we find out which panel we have in both devices so that
we don't classify one screen as being better just because it comes from a better
supplier. I also want to follow that up by benchmarking the new display so we can
properly compare it to the top-end one. For the first part, we're going to switch
over to the computer and I will show you how to do this on your own Steam Deck if
you want to know which panel you have. On your OLED Steam Deck, head over to desktop
mode, open Konsole, and enter this command. If you end up seeing 03 30 in the first line where
I am highlighting right now, you have a Samsung OED panel. To my knowledge, no one has reported
having a BOE panel, but that will say 04 30. We can know with full certainty that we
have a Samsung panel by decoding the edid so we can see the timings. The Samsung panel
and the BOE panel have different timings, and these are the timings that Valve
published online for the Samsung panel. After running the same command on my other OLED
Deck, I found that it is also a Samsung panel. Now it’s time to benchmark our
new screen so we have concrete data to work with. In the interest of
getting an apples-to-apples comparison, I redid my original benchmark of my
1TB OLED Deck also running on 3.5.6. When it comes to the glossy OLED Deck, we have
100% of the sRGB color space, and we slightly exceed the rated 600 nits of brightness for
this panel with a measurement of 601 nits. For the P3 color space, we have 90.2% coverage. When it comes to the 1TB OLED Deck with etched
glass, we essentially have 100% sRGB coverage, but our max brightness is just a bit lower
at 588 nits. This difference is very small, and it wasn’t something that I could notice
before doing this test. For the P3 color space, we scored slightly higher than
the other OLED Deck at 90.7%. I also measured the color temperature of both
screens, and I got almost the same value. So at least based on the data that we have, we
don’t have a clear winner. The 1TB screen has a wider gamut, but it is well within a
margin of error for a component like this. We will look at these screens in a
few different settings for this video, but the takeaway from these tests is
that in at least one of those settings, there should be no visible
difference between these panels.
now that we've benchmarked both of these steam
decks and we know what display they're using it's time to take a look at how they operate
in different settings this is going to be the biggest part of this video now there are a lot of
different ways you can use a steam deck and there are a lot of different settings that you can play
a steam deck in for the purposes of this video I'm going to boil this down to three tests that are
the most common for my use case the first one is indoors with lights on the second one is indoors
at night with no lights on and the third one is outside on a cloudy day or in the shade we're
going to start off with the easiest scenario to look at and it's the one that I find myself in
the most with my steam deck as I've talked about in a lot of other videos I do most of my gaming
at night and that's primarily when I'm using my steam deck the most currently I'm playing through
a ton of retro emulation on this bottom steam deck here after I did that emulation video and in those
situations there shouldn't be a difference between these screens at all because we're seeing them
in the same way that the measuring tool does but nevertheless we'll still take a look at it so for
this we're going to have to shut off the studio lights to simulate playing this at night and again
this is how I use my steam deck the most we're going to take a look at two games for this section
the first one is stray and I have it loaded into the same Save State on both of these decks and to
my eyes I can't see a difference between the two of these keep in mind that the steam deck on top
is the one with a higher brightness but the one on the bottom which is the one tbyte model has
a wider color gamut the small differences that we do have in the actual display are just too
small that you'd never be able to see them in a situation like this but we can just do a small
test of the viewing angles to make sure that that didn't change so this is the 512 OLED and this is
front back right side left side and then the four diagonals and here's that same situation on the
1 tbte model front back right left and then the diagonals as you can probably imagine they
look the same and the second title that we're going to look at is Metroid
for the NES again these look very similar but I'll still show it for the
purposes of this video here's the 512 unit and here's the 1 tby if you have an OLED deck this is a great
game to play through highly recommend it now let's move over to the next scenario our next
scenario is using the steam deck indoors with lighting and this is the second most common way
that I'll use my own steam deck in the situation I'm in right now I have controlled lighting
there is a big light in front of me and if we just leave the steam decks down on a table like
this they should still look the same with the only difference being that there might be some
parts of one steam deck that aren't as in Focus as the other what we need to do is see how the
panels interact with a lighting source to see how that impacts the display itself and we're going to
start with Metroid since it has a lot of black on the screen if you're completely new to the steam
deck then I think we can start by going over what it is that the etch glass even does in the first
place if I take my steam deck and I lift it back like this the light source reflection starts over
here on the top and then it will diffuse across the entire screen so this part right here has
the brightest reflection and then it starts to diffuse out as we get down to the bottom and when
it gets all the way to the bottom it's basically still pitch black and you can see if we push this
back even more we can cover the entire screen so it's reflecting the full light source but it's
diffused across the entire screen and it's not that harsh if we do that same thing now again with
the glossy screen you'll see that that initial reflection is very harsh but then if you just go
just a bit under it the rest of the screen is very mute if we tilt til it back so that way we are
reflecting the entire light source this is how it looks if you've read any discussion on this
new etch glass OLED model then you'll know that there's a lot of talk about how this ET
glass will ruin the vibrancy of the colors that we're getting because it's getting in the
way if we look at this area right here on both screens I can say that that part looks better
on the glossy screen than it does on the etge glass screen at least with the way that the
camera is in Focus right now this top part looks about the same on both models but if we
were actually to focus on that glass like your eyes would be if you were playing this game
the situation is a bit different so there are pros and cons to both of these screens the
problem with the glossy screen is when you do focus on those Reflections they're very
clear and they can be distracting whereas on the EDG glass version that doesn't happen
or at least it doesn't happen to that extent basically in almost any test that we do where
we're looking at a light just bouncing directly at the screen you'll have a better experience
with the etch glass OLED screen than you will on the glossy one if you see here we have the
light source shining over onto this pillar and it diffuses out to about this point even with
this light pointed directly at the screen I can still see everything on the screen itself
if we put that same light over on the glossy screen I can still see the same elements but
it doesn't look as good to me but what about the edge glass taking away from the goodness of
this OLED screen and there's only one situation where the edch glass pulls ahead in my opinion
in all of the testing that I did if you go to an area of the screen where the edge glass
would diffuse those elements look much better on the glossy screen the diffusion that we have
here does have an impact on the picture quality in that area but it's not that big of a deal
more than anything else I think in situations like this it matters a lot more how much light
you have on your face because that is going to reflect very clearly on a big glossy screen for
example here's my hand reflected onto the screen you can see my hand but it's not that clear
and if we do that same thing on the glossy screen you can see it's super distracting and
this has been my experience with the original deck but we have one final scenario to
take a look at which is gaming Outdoors For the last test, I took both Decks
out to the park and sat in the shade under a tree. With 600 nits of
peak brightness for SDR content, we have more than enough power here
to make this a viable option outdoors. On the 1TB OLED Deck, we can still see reflections of the tree that is behind me,
but the game is still playable. When we switch over to the 512
Deck, the game is still playable, but it is way more distracting since
the screen can reflect the universe. Even though this version looks better in the
studio setting when we have a controlled light, I think it loses that benefit when you have all
kinds of random colors reflecting over your scene. And those are brighter games, it gets
worse when you play something that is darker because this screen
will turn into a mirror. The etched glass Deck just holds
up way better in this situation.
After going through all of this, I
have a few takeaways and suggestions that might help you if you are
unsure of which model to buy. The first thing is that the etched glass screen
did not have as big of an impact on the OLED panel as I was led to believe from the comments
that I read online. From some of the posts that were made, you’d swear the etched glass would turn
the screen into trash, but I’m not seeing that. The second takeaway has to do with the
setting that you play in. If you do most of your gaming in the dark at night, there
is no difference between either of these, so I doesn’t matter which option you go with.
Lastly, no matter which option you go with, Samsung seems to have done a great job
at providing a consistent screen for this first batch of panels. We won’t know
how that will hold up going forward or if the BOE panels can match this quality,
but this is a good initial impression. If you still don’t know which option you
should buy, here’s my advice. Buy the model that you have enough money to afford. If
you can only afford the cheaper OLED version, just buy it. You can always get
an etched glass screen protector to put over it in the future. You can also
upgrade the storage to 1TB if you need to. On the flip side of this, you can also use
a glossy screen protector on an etched glass screen to make it look like a standard panel.
I did this on one of my original 512 Decks, and I think it looks great. After spending so
much time with the etched glass screen on the original Deck, I like how the panel
looks with this protector installed. More than anything else, the other parts of
these packages are more important things to consider. These would be the charging case,
better protective case with the inner shell, and the increased storage. That being said, I
think the etched glass screen holds up better than the glossy one, especially in uncontrolled
lighting situations. I hope that helps. If you enjoyed this video and you
want to see another, take a look at the big emulation video that I did on the OLED
Steam Deck. Happy gaming everyone, Taki out.
