How to Fix (or Prevent) Power Outages on Your Nintendo Switch
The beauty of the Nintendo Switch is that it gives you the ability to go from playing on your laptop to watching it on the big screen in seconds. However, this magnificence certainly dims if you have to deal with occasional blackouts on your TV. If you’re having this problem with your Switch, there are two things you should know: You’re not alone, and there is a solution.
Reddit user r/Ramen-Noodle-Bear had this issue . They struggled to figure out why their OLED switch would sometimes display a black screen for about four to five seconds at a time when connected to their LG C9 OLED TV. During these blackouts, there was no sound, but the Switch portable display did not turn on: the console still recognized that it was connected to the docking station. Also, the Ramen-Noodle-Bear Joy-Cons were still running during those picture interruptions, assuming the system hadn’t been asleep the whole time.
As a biomedical equipment technician in his offline life, Ramen-Noodle-Bear claims to be good at troubleshooting and has begun trying and testing every variable under the sun. They have completely updated the firmware for both the TV and the Switch; they made sure the TV didn’t just turn off, switch inputs, or adjust HDR settings; they promise: “If you read somewhere that someone has tried, I did it.”
Fix: New HDMI Cable
Luckily, Ramen-Noodle-Bear eventually stumbled upon a solution that saved their sanity, as well as the sanity of everyone who faced these Switch outages: you need to switch (hehe) to an HDMI 1.4 cable .
You see, Nintendo has packaged an HDMI 2.0 cable with an OLED switch to match the output port, which has also been upgraded to the new standard. The switch can apparently handle both HDMI 1.4 and HDMI 2.0, meaning you won’t see a difference in gameplay or performance when using one over the other. However, for some reason the newer standard can result in insane video outages, especially with this particular LG TV.
It’s hard to say why HDMI 2.0 can cause this handshake problem and HDMI 1.4 doesn’t: there might be a slight incompatibility between the LG C9 TV and the switch’s HDMI 2.0 output. Ramen-Noodle-Bear speculates that the problem may be the 2.0’s increased data rate to 18Gbps, up from 10.2Gbps in 1.4, although these theoretical maximums have no additional effect on gameplay or performance. That said, HDMI 2.0 isn’t a new technology – it’s been around since 2015, so being incompatible with a new TV looks odd.
Whatever the reason, swapping that 2.0 cable for a 1.4 cable does the trick, and it’s a cheap solution: you can find plenty of cable options on Amazon for less than $10 . Ramen-Noodle-Bear is not alone who has experienced this problem or tried this solution: the top comment in their Reddit thread describes the same problem with the same TV and switch models, and others echo similar sentiments and thank Ramen-Noodle-Bear. for solutions.
Another possible solution
However, other Redditors have reported suffering from power outages while using other equipment and have come up with another solution to fix the problem. These gamers were using the Switch on launch day, not the OLED model, and were having trouble connecting to their Samsung TV. The fix for these required changing the TV’s RGB settings to “Restricted Spectrum”. If your problem is related to this hardware setting, try changing this setting before purchasing a new cable.
You’d think we’ve already dealt with these audio/video issues. Alas, as long as we’re linking devices from two different companies together, occasional incompatibilities are to be expected. Maybe Nintendo should just make their own TVs.