YouTuber ruins Nintendo Switch OLED screen after running it for two years straight

One Youtuber managed to ruin his Nintendo Switch OLED screen after leaving a screenshot from The Legend of Zelda on the screen for two years.

Nintendo released the revolutionary console, the Switch, in 2017 that fans immediately adored thanks to its ability to be used as a handheld console or be linked to a big screen to play with friends.

Four years later the gaming company released a revised and updated version of the console, the Nintendo Switch OLED, which fans tepidly responded to, despite featuring the premiere screen technology “OLED.”

But, one YouTuber, WULFF DEN, managed to ruin their Nintendo Switch OLED by leaving it on for two years, damaging the screen due to a particular weakness of the screen type.

Youtuber burns Zelda image into Nintendo Switch screen

OLED outperforms nearly every other screen type, like LCD or VA, thanks to its high contrast ratio, low power consumption, and high color accuracy, but it is vulnerable to burn-in where certain sub-pixels get dimmer and dimmer.

WULFF DEN tested if Nintendo’s OLED screen would suffer from burn-in by leaving a screenshot from The Legend of Zelda for two years: “What happens if you leave an OLED Nintendo Switch on for 2 years straight?“

Youtube: WULFF DEN

The Youtuber stated that the burn-in left by the image was obvious, particularly on an all-red or all-white screen:

“You can clearly see the burn-in that has occurred […] the whole thing is starting to burn in a lot.”

However, despite it being “very distracting” to play a game with a lot of red or white colors, WULFF DEN concluded that he almost didn’t notice the burn-in on games that didn’t use a lot of those colors: “I gotta be honest, I played a decent amount of Super Mario Wonder on here, and I forgot that it was burned in, I kinda fell into the game and played it for a really long time.”

The results of this experiment were released alongside some more bad news for Switch fanatics after Twitch announced that they would be ending support for their Nintendo Switch next year.