And that’s the triangular sub-pixel arrangement which causes color fringing.

I can’t believe I forgot to anticipate this, as I have had the Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED for over a year now and I should have known this was coming since I deal with it every single day.

As soon as I saw the boot logo I saw it, color fringing all over the the Steam Deck logo (especially the white part).

I boot into the UI, all of the bright white text has color fringing, clean line graphical elements have fringing, it’s everywhere >_<. The Steam UI, fonts, and colors were definitely not adjusted to compensate for the triangular sub-pixel arrangement.

Ultimately the increase in picture quality is definitely worth it, but it was a harsh reminder to myself that we haven’t quite reached perfect panels yet. I love my QD-OLED desktop monitor despite the fringing and I know I’ll love the Steam Deck screen, so I’m not too worried, you kinda get used to it.

I saw recently that the QD-OLED “2.0” panels coming out this year have a slightly better triangular arrangement that gives a lot less fringing, but hopefully one day we’ll have OLEDs that have 0 fringing.

I believe there’s also ways Valve can help mitigate the fringing via software (font improvements) and OS updates (maybe better sub-pixel support), so maybe they can work to improve this in the future.