Monday, June 24, 2013

Nyrius ARIES NAVS500 HD Wireless HDMI REVIEW

I had to order one of these for work and do some testing in the lab so I thought I drop a quick review.  


The Nyrius ARIES NAVS500 sells for about $180 on Amazon and is intended to connect your HDMI stuff to a remote display wirelessly.  The idea is you plug your Blue-ray player or the like into one of the boxes and then the other into your TV.  The video/audio is wirelessly transmitted to the TV.  


The setup was insanely easy.  Really, I just pulled it out of the box and plugged each box into the the TV/device.  I happened to also be testing a Roku 2 XS at the time so I used that for my source and a Sharp Aquos for the display.  Boom!  It just worked.  I had the Roku in the other room and used its RF remote to test the delay.  The delay was hardly noticeable and the resolution looked great.

 Other Stuff.  I noticed a USB and IR ports.  IR is dead in my mind (I hate IR remotes) so if you want to see how that works you'll have to do some messing of your own.  I was curious about the USB though.  I plugged in a computer's HMDI and USB in one box and a display, mouse, and keyboard in the other box.  Again, boom!, it just worked.  I had wireless HDMI and USB keyboard/mouse with minimal setup.

Now that I had a computer setup I wanted to see how hard I could push the graphics.  I forced the signal to several resolutions greater than 1080P.  The image always fell back to 1080P. I was hoping to squeeze more out of it but I guess that's better than having it drop the signal entirely.

As far as distance, I could get it through about two walls.  Once I introduced a third wall the signal started dropping.  Your mileage may vary.

Final thoughts.  My philosophy when it comes to data is if you can run wire run wire -- ethernet, HDMI, etc.  Personally, I run HDMI in my walls. However, for various reasons that doesn't always work.  I was super impressed with how simple and how great the image looked on this device.