Lab – The Steam Deck screen could use some color

Officially available since February 25, Valve’s Steam Deck finally arrived in our test labs a few days ago. Extremely singular machine, neither quite a game console nor really a PC, and generally incomparable to any other product ever launched on the market, the beast has not finished occupying us, and we will have many, very many things to tell you about him in the days and weeks to come.

But from our first tests, the first notable findings about it began to emerge. Especially about its screen, whose performance immediately jumped out at us – alas, not in a good way.

A little weak contrast, but not only

We knew it since the announcement of the machine, the Steam Deck has a 7-inch IPS LCD screen, in 1280 x 800 pixel definition. These specs aren’t particularly dreamy on paper, but they’re nothing to be ashamed of either. The pixel density of 216 points per inch certainly seems low compared to the standards of current smartphones, but it is more than enough for a display whose primary mission is not to display texts. As for IPS technology, it is certainly not as enticing and promising as the Oled, but it generally goes hand in hand with excellent color reproduction.

“Generally”, we took care to specify, because alas, a thousand times alas, the Steam Deck screen is an exception to this rule. You realize this at first glance: the image produced is surprisingly dull, bland – and this is not only a consequence of its relatively low contrast (1240:1), a limit inherent in the IPS.

No, this sensation is above all a matter of colors, which our probes confirm. On the one hand, the color temperature at 7889 K, against a target at 6500 K, indicates shades of gray tending towards blue. As for the average delta E 94, it stands at 5.6, very significantly above the value of 3 that we usually consider in Digital as the limit of the perceptible for everyday use. However, this figure alone cannot sum up the extent of the problem.

Primary colors that are far too unsaturated

To better illustrate the blandness we perceived with the naked eye, we set out to run the Steam Deck’s screen through the colorimetric measurements we ordinarily reserve for our TV tests. These are done in dE 2000, which is slightly more precise and representative of human perception than dE 94. The result is even less flattering, since the average drift is then 6.3. But the main thing to note here is the height of the drift peaks, and the colors to which they correspond — namely the primary and secondary colors at 100% saturation.

And this is where the biggest shortcoming of this screen lies: its RGB primaries have an intensity that is far too low. This is particularly dramatic on the blue primary (whose dE 2000 reaches the staggering value of 19.1!), but not only. The screen’s lack of saturation ultimately comes down to one number: it covers just 70% of the standardized sRGB/Rec. 709, while the vast majority of good current screens exceed 95%.

Ultimately, if one is unfortunate enough to usually play on a good quality monitor or TV — a fortiori if it is HDR compatible with extended color space — seeing your games running on Steam Deck gives the very unpleasant impression of contemplating a version veiled by a pastel filter, completely washed out.

A blandness in contradiction with the graphic ambitions of the machine

The problem is not insurmountable, but it is still very frustrating, because it immediately contradicts one of the main promises of the Steam Deck, namely its graphics performance. Since the AMD Van Gogh chip is intended to be powerful enough to run the vast majority of existing PC games in good conditions, including the most visually ambitious, it would have been the least you could do to associate it with a display to a little more precision and accuracy, in order to best respect the ever more elaborate artistic direction of said games.

We look forward to seeing you in the next few days for the rest of our Steam Deck tests.