How to Adjust the Brightness On Your Nintendo Switch

by Eric Ravenscraft on

Being able to take the Switch with you is one of the console’s best features. However, the portable screen’s auto-brightness feature leaves a little to be desired. Fortunately, there’s an easier way to adjust your screen’s brightness.

When you’re using your Switch in handheld mode, you can access a quick settings menu that lets you put the console to sleep, enable Airplane mode, and—most helpfully—adjust the brightness. This slide-out menu won’t show the brightness slider when docked with the TV since, you know, you can’t see the Switch’s screen then. However, you can still use that menu to put the console to sleep.

To pull up the quick settings menu, long-press the Home button. A slide-out menu will appear over your game with a slider you can use to adjust the brightness level.

You can also disable auto-brightness here. Technically, the auto-brightness is more of a dynamic brightness adjustment. You can use the slider to set a level that feels comfortable to you, and auto-brightness will attempt to keep it at a level that feels about the same, even when the ambient light changes.

Alternatively, you can disable the auto-brightness toggle, after which the display’s brightness won’t ever change and you can just adjust it manually.

Eric Ravenscraft covers smarthome tech for How-To Geek. He's a problem solver who never learned to say no to a project. When he's not fixing things, he's cosplaying at cons, playing video games, and watching too many comic book movies. You can follow him on Twitter or Instagram.