A drop-in low power OLED display upgrade for LCD model Steam Decks
DeckSight is a 1080P AMOLED display panel that drops into an LCD model Valve Steam Deck with no major modifications. DeckSight surpasses the stock LCD in almost every specification, making your games look sharper, more colorful, and with perfect black levels.
$130-140 for the screen
Display Technology: AMOLED
Size: 7” diagonal, 16:9 aspect (slightly shorter and wider than stock)
Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (up from 1200 x 800)
Color Depth: 10-bit, 1.07 billion colors (up from 8-bit, 16.7 million colors)
Brightness: 800 nits
Surface Options:
Matte: Anti-glare and anti-fingerprint etched glass (similar to highest end stock LCD)
Gloss: Anti-fingerprint coating (similar to 64 and 256 GB LCD models)
Refresh Rate: 60 Hz (currently), may be improved in before release or with BIOS patch (likely 80-90 Hz)
It's easier to source a screen with a particular size that has standard resolution.
The steamdeck has a super awkward resolution that doesn't fit into any standard aspect ratio. Which creates problems with some games.
If you want to play games on a lower resolution for performance reasons, you can always just to that. Games don't need to run on the native resolution.
Playing a lower resolution on a screen that has a higher one will generally also make the image look nicer, as the DPI is higher. (just be careful and don't scale to some weird fractional scales)
This may be feasible for WQHD, but upscaling from 960x540 > 1920x1080 doesn't really sound like an upgrade from WXGA anymore.
Another problem is that while there are some 3D games that support internal upscaling (FSR etc), not every game has the option to scale the UI indepently so things look extremely small at higher resolutions. The games that support both should be an exception and look better on a higher DPI screen.
I do believe that you could either slightly increase the resolution and screensize to 1600x1000 or 1600x900, or just use a WQHD-screen so you can get clean 2x upscaling from 720p.
My main laptop is literally 16:10, same res as a deck, pretty sure most Macbooks and productivity monitors are 16:10 too, my gf even snagged a 30" 16:10 monitor. Who tf even bothers with 16:9 anymore lmao it's the worst of all worlds.
I believe it has to do with availability of pre-existing screens. I don't think a startup can afford original deck exclusive OLED panels, these were probably mass produced for another device and are just being refitted for the Deck.