NVIDIA Shield TV user review

  • An absolute train-wreck of a device. Don't buy it.

    I suppose I should begin by saying that my primary reason for buying a Shield TV was to use as a media player. In particular, I wanted something that could handle 4K HDR playback, and also wanted 24Hz playback of Netflix videos.

    The Shield can do other things as well. You can use it as a games console (it's about as powerful as a high end 2018 smartphone, and can play Android games). It's also possible to "cast" PC games to it (i.e. stream audio and video to it in real time). I haven't tested the latter function at all, and the former only very little.


    Good Points
    • While the hardware is completely unchanged from the original 2015 version, it's still relatively powerful compared to the CPUs and GPUs you'll find in most media players. It can go toe-to-toe with a high-end 2018-vintage smartphone in many ways. That means that if you're running (say) Kodi, the UI is extremely snappy, and it can handle demanding skins.
    • Can be used for various general-purpose-computing functions - you could hook up USB drives to it and pretend it's a small NAS, or use it to download (legal) torrents, etc.
    • If used with Kodi, it can handle more or less any audio format you might throw at it in a locally streamed file, and can either bitstream it, or decode to multi-channel PCM.

    Those are the only nice things I can find to say about it.


    Bad Points
    • The most important thing to say about the Shield TV is that, when using it as a media player, the image quality is shockingly poor. The colours and luminances of the pixels that you see on the screen are simply wrong - they don't accurately reflect the colour values that are encoded in the video. The difference is not subtle - you don't need a colorimeter - simply switching to and fro between this and a better-quality device playing the same file, there are very visible differences in what you can see on the screen.
    • The picture quality is particularly bad when playing back 4k/24Hz HDR. It is not able to output 10-bit video at 4K/24Hz; instead it converts it to 12-bit, and does it wrongly, so everything is dithered down to 8 bits, and you get ugly banding/posterization. Sometimes you get a weird green tint to the picture too.
    • It has the worst upscaling quality I've ever seen.
    • It's not capable of switching between rec.709 and rec.2020 colour spaces automatically. You need rec.709 output for SDR material, and rec.2020 for HDR; but you have to choose one or the other, and it stays locked. You can change it manually, but that requires going through several levels of menu options each time. If you don't change it, then it attempts to map colours from one colour space to the other - and gets it wrong.
    • Can't handle MVC 3D.
    • No Dolby Vision support on Internet streaming apps.
    • No 4K or HDR playback in YouTube.
    • Chroma upsampling uses a nearest-neighbour algorithm - again, the worst I've ever seen.

    And here's a list of things wrong with the Netflix app specifically:
    • It can't switch refresh rates on the fly. So if your output is set to 60Hz and you starting watching an episode of Black Mirror, it's converting 25/50Hz to 60Hz on the fly. This doesn't look good.
    • If you go out of Netflix and change the desktop refresh rate, when you go back in, Netflix "helpfully" switches the refresh rate back to what it was when you launched it. The only way to change the refresh rate Netflix is using is to force stop the app.
    • Can't switch resolution on the fly, so you get the Shield's awful upscaling at full blast.
    • Unless you have the refresh rate set to either 50 or 60Hz, you cannot view anything in 4K - it's capped at 1080p and with no HDR option. Since most 4K material on Netflix is filmed at 24fps, if you do set the Shield to 60Hz (or 59.94) then you get 3:2 judder on everything.
    • 1080p/24 playback in Netflix occasionally skips frames (several times over a period of a few seconds). [It's conceivable they may have fixed this one in a recent release, I haven't tested in a while].
    • Netflix audio is encoded as Dolby Digital Plus. Unusually, the Shield isn't capable of extracting the core 5.1 Dolby Digital sound from a DD+ stream; so, if you connect it to a television or AVR which doesn't support DD+ and run Netflix, the Shield drops straight down to stereo PCM instead of giving you 5.1 DD.

    Update, November 2018:
    The latest version of the Shield Experience software, combined with the latest beta of Kodi v18 (Leia) fixes (or mitigates) a few of the above issues. Specifically, the 10-bit/HDR image quality is improved (no more banding) and the mapping from rec.2020 to rec.709 colour spaces is much better. (Meaning it's a but less painful to leave it sets permanently to rec.2020. But many calibrated TVs won't have SDR rec.2020 calibration settings, so it's still not ideal). This doesn't change my overall recommendation, however.
    This item was purchased for £194.76 from Amazon in 2017 . The reviewer still owns this product.

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    Comments

    As the Shield performs poorly, you'd want the option of 'Source Direct' similar to what the Oppo Blu-ray players have. I have rarely seen this option for media players, a limitation of the chipset or OS?
     
    Can’t agree with the claims of poor image quality. I’m sat here with Starship Troopers playing in UHD via my CXUHD and a full rip on the Shield and flicking between the two, there is absoluteky no difference in image quality
     
    @Joe C Try playing 1080p source high bitrate bluray material on the shield vs another media player, like the native TV app. Enjoy the terrible upscaling from nvidia.
     
    @Roen I don’t - as I’ve said previously, I use it purely for UHD stuff
     
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NVIDIA Shield TV

Comments
4
Author
NicolasB
Review score
2 / 10
Average score
5.5 / 10
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