Here's my
newbie & non-professional review of the NVidia Shield Android TV
Build Quality9.5 / 10Of all the media players I have tried (Egreat, Dune, Popcorn Hour, HiMedia), the NVidia Shield is by far has the best build quality. The player itself is very sturdy and heavy. The default gaming remote(controller) is solidly built comparable to PS4 gaming controller. Even the power brick is of high quality unlike other brands that is of generic type.
User Interface8.5 / 10The Android based software is very smooth and fluid.
NVidia really worked hard on this.
The voice recognition (mic) that is built in the game controller is very accurate and useful that I don't need to type or use the on-screen keyboard when searching apps on the Google Play and youtube.
Device set up is a breeze
PlaybackVideo7.5 / 104K playback has some limitations as some of my downloaded 4K materials didn't play.
All my Full HD remux mkv played smoothly.
There's even an option for 4K / 23.976Hz playback.
One of the downside is I can't playback my iso files, maybe I need to install Kodi but according to other forums, HD-Audio passthrough is not supported in Kodi yet.
The player is also not capable of BDMV playback but you can browse the BDMV folder and look for the main movie.
There's NO Full Bluray Menu support also.
Haven't tried 3D playback yet so I have to update this once I got to test it.
Hopefully in the future upgrades they will include iso playback in their internal video player...
Audio9.5 / 10Dolby True HD, DTS Master Audio and Dolby Atmos where all bitstreamed without any problem using the default video player.
I will have to play around with the unit to see if it could decode these HD Audio and output LPCM.
Picture QualityBased from my
untrained eyes, this NVidia Shield has the best PQ of all the media players I have tried.
NVidia really has lived up to its reputation as a respected dedicated graphics card manufacturer and its very evident with their NVidia Shield.
With my Oppo 103 as reference (100%), I could safely say that the NVidia Shield is at 91% level
Contrast and black levels are very very good
So far I'm really impressed with this player that I am considering getting another one for the bedroom
It is more expensive than other 4K Android media players but its capability, potential and solid build quality is worth the price