The Steam Deck OLED display might burn out in as little as 750 hours.
Youtuber The Phawx discovered this, conducting a stress test of the handheld’s screen using an app that he developed himself.
The application sends several static labels on the display in different modes and with varying brightness: SDR 90 nit, SDR 190 nit, SDR 400 nit, HDR 1000 nit, and HDR with the maximum use of each subpixel – green, blue, and red.
In this form, the blogger planned to leave the image on the console display for 1000 hours, but after just 750 hours, he found that the screen had burned out: obviously, most strongly in the place where the HDR label was shining at 1000 nit brightness.
It’s worth considering that this app is designed to cause maximum damage to the display. In real usage, gamers will not have a continuous static image burning for this amount of time, let alone constantly in HDR mode and at maximum brightness, so this test does not equal the real playing time that would lead to screen burn-out.
Yet, the Nintendo Switch OLED display is showing more resilience in stress tests, not burning as strongly even after thousands of hours of static imagery. However, it should be noted that there are no specialized applications developed for testing the Switch’s display, and the maximum brightness is only 343 nit.