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Doom Eternal (Left: Legion Go, Right: Steam Deck OLED)

One of the reasons why I didn’t play my LCD SD much is because many of the games I wanted to play support HDR and I felt like I was missing out playing it on the go and the colors were pretty bad.

Though I appreciate the update to the LCD’s color reproduction, it wasn’t going to change anything for me though. The announcement of HDR made my really excited about the OLED. Out of curiosity, I picked up a Legion Go to see how I feel about the size of the screen…and that’s when my first world problem began.

The software experience on the Legion Go was messy…as expected. Anyways, once I was actually playing games in handheld and tabletop mode…I really fell for it. I sudden didn’t know which I wanted to keep.

However, games like Cyberpunk and FF7r really sold me on HDR in the first place and they look great on the OLED screen. Though the Legion Go has a very nice screen indeed. The color reproduction matched between the two, it was just the clarity and the "3d"ness brought out by the mix of highlights and god rays that made me finally cave in on the SD OLED.

If the Legion Go had a OLED HDR screen though…I think I would have put up with the software and battery life for the "joycon"s and extra large screen as I enjoy tabletop mode a lot; same as on my Switch OLED. It’s also super relaxing in handheld mode because it was basically sitting in my laptop. It’s still light enough for me to play in bed though too. Also I feel others can join me in playing some fighting and kart racing games with that bright 8.8 inch screen. The Legion’s “sleep mode” was pretty functional too. Used 3% in about 6 hours. The extra performance was “alright.” It’s noticeable in some cases but nothing game changing really.

One more thought is the Legion Go’s 144hz screen is basically the next best thing to VRR. 7ms per screen refresh isn’t going to mess with me too much on a refresh miss. 90hz isn’t too bad either, at 11.1ms per screen refresh.

Part of all of this for me is, I realize I’m primarily a handheld gamer. I still like and want to play video games but I don’t really want to inconvenience very much to play them anymore. Laptop gaming is its own beast but I mostly use my laptop for work so I don’t really want to mix the two anyways, primarily reasons being for the SSD space, using the battery for working purposes, putting the game to “sleep” and lastly it’s not handheld :).

Enjoy the freedom you get with portable/handheld gaming my peeps.