I have owned and regularly used a steam deck LCD for over a year. A few days ago my oled steam deck arrived. Unfortunately my experience was not nearly as flawless and great as most Reviewers make it out to be. Basically there are two main issues I have with it

1: the abxy buttons and d-pad feel much more mushy than the old one, have no click to them at all and they are manufactured with such inconsistency and high tolerance that they audibly rattle around whenever I move the steam deck around. At first I thought there where loose parts inside but it turns out there are not and it’s just the buttons and d-pad rattling around because they aren’t properly attached and they are much smaller (if I had to guess the dpad is about 1-2mm smaller measured from end to end) than the old ones but the holes for them in the chassis remain the same which is part of what causes them to rattle.

2: the oled screen has a very bad case of “mura” which is as far as I know a issue with oled that is at least common enough that you can read about it on online. Basically all the pixels are not the same brightness due to manufacturing inconsistency and bad calibration which leads to a grainy inconsistent picture. It looks like there is always a very strong film grain filter on everything. And no it’s not one game I was testing that has a film grain filter that I didn’t disable, from the second it boots up and you see the startup movie you can see it and you can also see it in all the menus and even in desktop mode. This effect is not to be confused with “screen door effect” which can sometimes look similar but is caused by there being big black gaps between the individual pixels. I got a 512gb Version with a Samsung screen. The LCD steam deck does not have any similar effect, besides it being slightly smaller, 60hz and having back light problems, which are more rarely a issue than a permanent film grain like filter that basically ruins most scenes that aren’t just black, to me it looks much better than the oled screen. (I am colorblind so the better colors of the oled don’t matter to me)

Conclusion: I feel like the oled steam deck is massively oversold by most reviewers since I have not seen anyone talk about the mushy controller buttons or the bad parts about the screen yet. In my opinion it is much more of a sidegrade than a actual improvement. It’s not even much more quiet than my LCD steam deck, under the same load they sound about the same. The oled runs at about 60c and the LCD at 80c tho so if they improved the Fan curve and bring the oled closer to 80c or more they could improve the noise output substantially. You trade better battery life and slightly less noisy fan for much worse mushy controls. And in my opinion the screen is also a sidegrade not a upgrade, you just trade a higher refresh rate and better blacks and slight size increase for a permanent heavy film grain filter that you can’t do anything about. At least if you are bothered by the bad blacks of the LCD you aren’t bothered in games that don’t or rarely show complete blacks. All these bad parts about it make me actually prefer playing on the LCD steam deck.