#Ds has a brighter screen than 3ds serial#
#Ds has a brighter screen than 3ds manual#

This is an interesting little find, since Nintendo never officially advertised IPS as a special feature of the 3DS. Unfortunately this means that you won't be able to determine which display you have before purchase and that the most surefire way to tell is to unbox the console and look at it.

#Ds has a brighter screen than 3ds serial#

You can get either display regardless of region, serial number, time of purchase, or if the 3DS is a special limited edition model or not. There also doesn't seem to be any consistent pattern in TN/IPS trends between the units. Again, this cannot be properly verified without official confirmation, which Nintendo probably isn't going to do. There was a claim on Reddit that you can tell which model yours is without powering it on by looking at how it's packaged ones that slide out upwards from the box are supposedly TN while ones from the side are IPS. Since 2015 however, there have been reports of either top and/or bottom displays having IPS panels for both N3DS and N3DS XL consoles. The IPS N3DS XL models are apparently more common than TN models. According to threads on NeoGaf and Reddit, some models of the New 3DS XL have IPS display panels, although without any official word from Nintendo it's hard to eliminate the possibility that other models don't. (the game shown is a fake mockup I made, sorry)

#Ds has a brighter screen than 3ds manual#

The console on the left has an IPS top screen while the one on the right has a TN display.īoth consoles had been set to the same brightness level and the image was captured with fixed manual exposure settings to prevent the camera from altering exposure in between shots. If not much changes in terms of colour, then it's likely an IPS display. If the dark areas start to look brighter and colours change, then you probably have a TN display. For consoles purchased during or after 2015, pay attention to both screens as some consoles have dual-IPS displays. For consoles purchased before 2015, focus on the top screen only, as all lower screens would be TN. Otherwise, there's another easy way to check, and that's simply to turn on the 3DS and look at the screens from below at an angle. If you have a working CFW or have access to homebrew, you can use 3DSident by Joel16 to identify which display hardware version you have. Here's a more detailed guide to the different displays used in gaming monitors. Even then, the milliseconds' difference is negligible to the human eye. This comes at a cost of having higher power consumption, potential scanline effects, as well as a few milliseconds of pixel delay (though it shouldn't matter so much since pixel delay isn't the same as input lag, so it only affect the time it takes for a pixel to fully change colour). If you view the screen from a wide angle, the image remains as clear as if you were looking directly at a 90º angle. Dark areas remain dark while colour saturation and contrast is more vivid than on TN counterparts. These displays are more expensive, but produce better colours. Some newer units have been equipped with IPS (In-Plane Switching) top and/or bottom displays. This is why players often prefer having an IPS display. One of the most telltale signs of a TN display is having the screen colours appearing washed out, even inverted when viewed from very slanted angles. The main drawback is that TN displays have less-than-ideal contrast and colour reproduction. It also draws slightly less power, which in turn should allow for longer usage between charge cycles, though this largely depends on other factors such as types of games being played, 3D mode, wireless settings, and screen brightness. The most common one used is the TN (Twisted Nematic) display, which has faster pixel response times and is relatively cheaper to use. Each works in slightly different ways and have their own merits. So far, Nintendo has used two different types of display panel between the 3DS (and N3DS): TN and IPS.

Since this has been asked in multiple threads and there hasn't been a unified thread about it yet, I thought I'd write one here. There have been several discussions on here about the different types of display panels used by Nintendo in different 3DS units, with some displays having better image presentation than others.