I just replaced my first-gen FireTV with an NVidia Shield Pro. The primary impetus for the upgrade was my ongoing displeasure with the picture quality on the FireTV - namely the washed out blacks (letterbox bars were noticeably grey). I'd been told that the picture quality on the Shield would be better, but I was rather skeptical since the content is doing digital into my AVR and I tend to run all of my devices flat / direct with as little tweaking as possible. But now that I've got the Shield up and running and have compared identical content between the two devices, the difference isn't subtle. The Shield smokes the FireTV. Colors are rich. Things aren't washed out. Letterbox bars are black.

My system is Devices (FireTV, Shield, Sony Blu-Ray) -> Denon DN-500AV -> Hisense H9.

The apps in the TV have picture quality closer to the Shield. The blu-ray player looks great, too.

So what's going on? Why does the FireTV look so much worse than anything else? Wouldn't it be sending the same content to the receiver as the Shield?