Nintendo: 3DS XL pixel size increase won't look "awkward"

An increased pixel size for the 3DS XL will not look "awkward", Nintendo has said.

Company president Satoru Iwata broached the subject during his latest Iwata Asks interview, noting customer concern on how existing games will look, stretched to the width of the system's larger screens.

"Many customers appear to be worried, asking questions like 'If the screen is bigger, won't the dots stand out?' and 'Will the screen get blurry?'," Iwata said.

"Apparently I have incredible eyesight, so if you look at it with eyes like mine, you can tell. (laughs)," explained Takashi Murakami, from Nintendo's Mechanical Design Group. "But for normal play, I don't think anyone will be able to sense anything awkward."

"The dots are indeed smaller than on the Nintendo DSi XL system," Iwata added, name-checking the original DS system's own bigger brother. "When I played [the 3DS XL], I wasn't bothered by anything at all."

Nintendo's super-sized 3DS XL will also boast advanced anti-reflection technology for the system's screens. Screen glare should be reduced by nine per cent from the standard 3DS.

"Anti-reflection is something that we've been working on for quite some time now," Murakami explained. "On a LCD screen there are basically three reflective layers, which all of them reflects and cause glare. So this time, we specially treated all the layers. Reflectivity on the Nintendo 3DS was about 12 per cent, but we decreased that to about three per cent."

A bigger screen size will also increase the depth effect of the system's 3D, allowing for better parallax experience.