More than just a super-sized 3DS

3DS XL lands in Europe and Japan a week from now, with North America joining in on 19th August. There’s been a justifiable temptation for some to readily dismiss the new model as a re-scaled 3DS with no actual technological improvements. While that’s a true comment in terms of processors and graphics chips, the new model does bring other improvements beyond extra large screens.

The latest Iwata Asks interview includes members of the hardware team that was responsible for developing the XL model. It’s an interesting read as it highlights the design processes and issues faced while producing the system, but we’ve picked out two particular sections as examples. The first is from Miyatake-san, who was involved in the Design Group. Read more ……

The 3DS XL Has Special Anti-Glare Screens

The 3DS XL brings a lot of improvements to the 3Ds hardware, most notably a larger screen, more storage capacity, and a stylus that’s once again easily accessible (like it was on the DS and DS Lite). We liked the new system very much when we compared it side-by-side with the 3DS at Comic-Con.

Nintendo neglected to mention before now though that the screens are not only 90 percent larger, but they also have a special anti-glare treatment that reportedly makes them the most glare-resistant screens in Nintendo’s storied handheld history.

“On a LCD screen there are basically three reflective layers, which all of them reflects and cause glare,” Nintendo’s Takeshi Murakami recently explained in an Iwata Asks segment. “So this time, we specially treated all the layers. Reflectivity on the Nintendo 3DS was about 12 percent, but we decreased that to about 3 percent.”

“Anti-reflection has been a topic every time since the Game Boy Advance system, but most of the time we had to give it up because of the cost,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata added.

But “the time finally came!” concluded Murakami. “When it comes to anti-reflection, this device beats all previous Nintendo game systems.”  Read more ……