Today, Shark is introducing its latest robot vacuum with the Matrix. Designed around an all-new cleaning system, the Matrix robot vacuum from Shark not only does parallel lines to clean your home but also does perpendicular and diagonal in order to ensure that it scrubs every square inch of carpet from every angle for the deepest clean possible. On top of that, it has a self-empty base, which is bagless and easy to use without taking up a lot of room in your home. Ready to learn more? We’ve spent the past few days with the latest Shark Matrix robot vacuum, and our hands-on review is down below.
Shark Matrix robot vacuum hands-on review
Shark’s Matrix Robot Vacuum has many of your typical features and functions that you’d expect to find in an automatic cleaner but also takes a different approach to a few key areas that really make me like the upgrades.
Though Shark has made self-emptying robot vacuums for a while, the Matrix is…different. While it still returns to the base and self-empties after (or in the middle of) every clean, instead of the base having a bag that has to be changed out when it gets full, Shark has designed a system that allows for it to be bagless. That’s right – no more bags! This not only saves you money in the long run but also makes it a much easier system to use. While we haven’t had our Matrix long enough to test the “up to 45 days” claim for how much it can hold, I will say that emptying the bin for the base is extremely easy, convenient, and something that I don’t mind doing. Whereas with past robot vacuums that I’ve had, it’s been an annoying task to have to empty the bin on the robot itself, so this is a very welcomed change.
The Shark Matrix robot vacuum also features an upgraded 360° LiDAR vision system, which helps it not only map your house but also detect and avoid objects and obstacles when cleaning. And this is probably my (and my wife’s) favorite part of the vacuum. We’ve had other robot vacuums in the house with LiDAR before, and even still, they typically bump into things before moving. The LiDAR system helped with mapping the house and knowing where the vacuum was for cleaning, but that was about it. However, the Matrix uses its LiDAR for more than just mapping. It uses the system to know when an object or obstacle is in its path, so long as it’s higher than a few inches tall, so cords and cables are excluded here.
This has been a very welcomed upgrade from my previous system. Instead of the robot bouncing into the couch, our coffee table, or the wall all the time, it stops just an inch or so short of those objects and just turns to go around them. This makes cleaning much more efficient as well as has a smaller chance of knocking something around when it’s running.
Another area that we’ve absolutely been blown away by, but also pleasantly surprised by, is the sound levels. At normal, which cleans fantastically with our deeper carpet, by the way, the vacuum is almost unnoticeable in its noise levels. I mean, you can hear it if you’re in the same room. But you won’t hear it across the house at all, which is another very welcomed feature here. Now, if you have an area of your home that really needs a deep clean, then the Shark app offers a spot clean function where the Matrix robot will run a five-by-five foot grid to really get everything picked up in that area. But otherwise, it’s ultra-quiet and does a great job.
The Shark app gives two cleaning modes when you choose either whole house or a single room: normal clean or Matrix clean. You can probably guess what normal clean is, but the Matrix clean creates a Matrix grid of your home and takes multiple passes from multiple angles to ensure that it gets every piece of dirt out of your carpet possible. This tracks with our usage so far as well; the Matrix cleaning mode was more thorough than the normal clean, took a little longer, and resulted in a very clean-feeling carpet. Another nice function of the app is that it gives you an approximate time of how long it’ll take to clean, which is nice to know before you start.
Another thing that was fantastic with the Shark app over the ones I’ve used in the past is that when making a room, you simply draw a square over the area, and that becomes the room. This allows you to get as detailed as you want with the map or be as generic as needed, something that I really enjoyed. One thing that I do wish the app did was give a live position of the vacuum as it’s cleaning. This is something our previous system offered, and it was nice to be able to see where it had already cleaned and what was left, though that’s something Shark could push out in a future update.
The Shark Matrix robot vacuum with auto-empty base is available starting today for an MSRP of $499.99. While this isn’t ultra-budget-friendly, for the features you get, it’s actually quite competitively priced, all things considered.
9to5Toys’ Take
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my time so far with the Shark Matrix robot vacuum. The cleaning performance has been fantastic in our testing so far, and even when we didn’t think the floor was super dirty, the dust bin got completely full, and the robot was nice and clean after it emptied itself. That, paired with how well it avoids objects around the house, means that I now feel like I can properly schedule this vacuum to clean routinely and not worry about what it might bump into…since it doesn’t really do that often and stops just shy of hitting the object before turning.
I also absolutely love the dock. It’s compact, nice-looking, and bagless. What more could you ask for? There are multiple filters in it to keep allergens from reentering your home during the emptying process, and cleaning it out takes just a second. It’s like emptying a cordless handheld vacuum but without having to do any of the cleaning work that typically goes along with it. The slimness of the dock is also one of its benefits, as it doesn’t take up any more horizontal room than a typical vacuum charger would while giving you all of the benefits of auto-emptying.
The one thing that I’m not entirely sure of yet is the Matrix cleaning pattern. While it absolutely seems like it would clean better than a normal pattern, as it goes in multiple angles to get all dirt trapped in the carpet, this robot vacuum does such a great job at cleaning normally that I’m not sure how much extra the Matrix path gets. That, and the fact that for me going from normal to Matrix only adds five minutes to the cleaning time in our biggest room, I’m not entirely sure how much more it does. I know it does more because the theory says it should, but I just haven’t proved that in practice.
Either way, however, the Shark Matrix in normal mode does leaps and bounds better than any robot vacuum I’ve used in the past, with the Matrix mode going one step further. So, regardless of which mode you plan to use this vacuum in, it gets a high recommendation from me for making your spring cleaning tasks a breeze this year. Plus, it’ll help keep your home neat and tidy throughout the seasons and into the holidays for when family starts to come around too.
At $500, we think that the Shark Matrix is a pretty solid contender in the realm of robot vacuums in our hands-on review. Shark has a few models that are lower cost, and Roomba’s i3+ EVO comes in at basically the same price. However, those options don’t utilize the same Matrix cleaning technology present here, making this model a superior value.
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