The Nintendo Switch 2 is the first piece of hardware that Nintendo has launched with support for HDR, and its implementation thus far has been a little mixed. Outside of the screen that isn’t equipped to get the best out of high dynamic range content, the settings for the HDR output via the dock are confusing, making it challenging to get a good picture to your much more capable display.
The good news is that with some time since launch, a lot of these frustrations have been deciphered into raw numbers that let you calibrate the Switch 2 perfectly for your display. HDTVTest has published a guide for how to set up your Nintendo Switch 2 with a range of displays, from LG and Samsung’s OLED TVs, a variety of OLED monitors, and even some brands that aren’t yet supporting HGIG, which is a critical dynamic tone mapping setting that the Switch 2 seems designed with in mind.
The issue with the system-level settings menu is that it’s not clear about what it’s changing in the background. Outside of its sun test pattern not working correctly without HGIG enabled (which makes calibration on displays without it a bit of guesswork still), each click upwards or downwards changings a nit setting in the background. The total value that you land on is then used to determine how many nits each notch raises the console’s white point in the screen that comes afterwards, making it impossible to set it between the desired 200-250 paper white value usually attributed to accurate HDR presentation.