Users of the original Steam Deck have a few major display upgrade / repair options: stick with the original screen, upgrade to a DeckHD, or buy a full Steam Deck OLED replacement. The folks at Digital Foundry were shipped a pre-assembled DeckHD unit, which they performed some hands-on comparisons with, alongside the other major upgrade options. We've included DF's original video in an embed below and will discuss its findings in due course.
Before we get too deep into this, though, it's important to establish that a higher resolution is not always a better thing, particularly in the handheld form factor. The Steam Deck is meant to target 30-60 FPS at 720p-800p in its Verified titles, and boosting the resolution target by 50% on a handheld may not always provide acceptable performance, especially in modern games. It nearly guarantees a 45-50% loss in GPU performance at the same settings, which is only acceptable if you have lots of headroom to start with.
Of course, the beauty of the PC platform means you can still use resolution scale and related settings to adjust ambitious titles to the limits of a higher-res display in a handheld form factor. 2D titles and less demanding games will still fundamentally benefit from a 1200p display, but generally speaking, 3D games look best at native resolution or with great scaling regardless of your native res.
In Digital Foundry's extended testing, the DeckHD proves to be a surprisingly adequate competitor to the Steam Deck OLED, at least when both are set to SDR and similar color temperatures. In this case, it's definitely a strong improvement over the original Steam Deck LCD screen, and the $99 cost of both an original Deck Antiglare Screen and the DeckHD Antiglare replacement screen points toward the DeckHD being the superior option in overall spec.
Technically, you can get a regular old replacement Steam Deck LCD screen for much cheaper than the DeckHD or original Antiglare LCD screen, but the existence of the full Steam Deck OLED upgrade makes that a slightly less-appetizing option. However, the DeckHD also comes with the major caveat of requiring manual installation and even firmware updates for the screen every time Valve updates the Steam Deck, which seems like it would get irritating very quickly.
Overall, people who don't already own a Steam Deck are still generally advised to go with the Deck OLED if at all possible, since it's still the best experience with the least headaches. However, if you want to repair or upgrade an LCD Steam Deck, Digital Foundry convincingly argues that the DeckHD is a very worthy option, albeit one that may only be suitable for the most determined hardware tweakers.
