A Spendy TV Glow-up for Film Evening at Residence

I lately went down a vivid, RGB-laden gap with a mission: to fulfill my curiosity about sensible lights that attempt to rip the colours off your TV and splash them onto the wall behind it. I’ve been skeptical of such TV lights muddying filmmakers’ intent the identical means fashionable TVs with movement smoothing and different AI picture processing can. After toying with the Philips Hue Play Wall Washer, I wouldn’t say I’m offered on the concept but, however the excellent news is that’s not all this little can stuffed with LED modules can do.

Signify, the corporate that licenses and makes merchandise underneath the Philips Hue model, would possibly primarily promote the Play Wall Washer as a means to boost your leisure system. Nevertheless it’s equally adept as wall-coating accent lighting or a wake-up gentle in your bed room, utilizing the identical interface that works for different colourful Hue sensible lighting. The Wall Washer itself is a small, upright lamp inside an aluminum enclosure that feels very sturdy. It initiatives gentle outward and upward from three rows of LED lights, every working to provide clean gradients and colours which are wealthy with out being garishly oversaturated, which I’ve all the time appreciated about the entire Hue sensible gentle line.

It’s a flexible little product, but I discover myself leaping via a number of psychological hoops to justify the Play Wall Washer. At $219.99, it’s not the most costly RGB gentle within the usually-spendy Philips Hue lineup, however you’ll nonetheless must both have or create a super house for it in your house to make it worthwhile. And it takes an entire lot more cash to make it work as a TV backlight.

Increasing your TV’s colours

Signify calls the Play Wall Washer an “immersive encompass lighting” expertise on your house leisure middle. The sensible gentle’s product web page reveals two Play Wall Washers standing astride an enormous TV, splaying inexperienced and blue gradients over a broad, near-featureless white wall.

See Philips Hue Play Wall Washer at Amazon

It takes a hefty funding—$384.99 for a two-pack of the sensible lights; one other $384.99 for the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K; and $65.99 for a Hue Bridge—to attain what Philips’ picture reveals, however it ain’t a lot simpler in your pockets with only one Play Wall Washer. You’ll be able to skip the Sync Field 8K (or the older $249.99 4K model) in case you have one of many recent 2022 or newer Samsung or 2024 LG TVs, for which Signify has a standalone Hue Sync app. However as a result of we will’t have something good, you’ll still be on the hook for a $129.99 one-time buy protecting a single TV or a $2.99 month-to-month subscription that’s good for 3 TVs. You don’t really want a Hue Bridge for those who’re not doing the TV-syncing factor—you may nonetheless use it as a flowery gradient-beaming gentle through the Hue app over Bluetooth—however you’ll additionally lose Matter help, limiting your sensible house ecosystem choices to simply Google Residence and Amazon Alexa.

I examined a single unit paired with the Sync Field 8K, which has 4 HDMI 2.1 inputs and one HDMI 2.1 output that may move as much as 4K content material at 120Hz (or 8K at 60Hz) via to your TV utilizing an included Extremely Excessive-Pace HDMI cable. You’ll be able to change inputs through the Hue app, however I discovered I by no means wanted to; its computerized input-switching once I turned on one other system was flawless. It additionally helps Dolby Imaginative and prescient and HDR10 video.

Setup within the Hue app is pretty fast and painless, involving slightly QR code-scanning and, for the Sync Field, tapping the button in your Hue Bridge and utilizing slightly graphic to pull the Play Wall Washer to its approximate location relative to your TV. After setup, controlling TV syncing—which you’ll do from the Sync tab within the app—is fairly simple, letting you do issues like tweak the brightness of your lights and depth of their results.

The principle benefit the Play Wall Washer has over protecting the again of your TV with RGB built-in circuit (RGBIC) gentle strips—the type with LED modules that may be managed individually, making coloration gradients alongside the strip potential—is that bodily setting it up is a breeze. You simply plop it down behind your TV, plug it and the Sync Field into the wall, hook up your HDMI cables to the Sync Field, and also you’re finished. The drawback is that it being a single gentle supply meansit’ll solid harsh shadows if there’s something mounted on the wall above it. LED strips don’t actually have that subject.

As soon as I cleared out some shadow-casting objects, the Sync Field and Play Wall Washer struck me as being good if what you’re after is extra of a vibe than seeing colours bleed out from the sting of your TV, or maybe bias lighting, which may make watching a display simpler in your eyes. Sure, it flashed its lights proper alongside the lightning within the opening sequence of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, when Kylo Ren first visits Exegol, and bloomed purple and orange within the sundown sequence of The Incredibles, as Mrs. Unimaginable races to avoid wasting a commuter bullet prepare from sure doom. However the gentle wasn’t as exactly positioned round my TV as that you just’d get from an LED strip slapped on the again of your TV.

It appeared a bit extra exact once I slipped it into gaming mode and performed Donkey Kong Bananza on my Nintendo Switch 2, however the impact was nonetheless muted. Even so, this left me much more satisfied by the entire TV backlight idea, at the very least for gaming—I’d even say I loved the spectacle. Motion pictures are offered as a bit of artwork meant to clean over you, however video video games are inherently participatory—the way you expertise their tales is as much as you, and for me at the very least, a synchronized gentle present feels extra additive than distracting.

So, worth and precision are the Play Wall Washer’s large weak factors. I A/B examined it towards the $149.99 Govee TV Backlight 3 Lite Kit (see the GIFs above), which makes use of an LED strip and two gentle bars, and the even cheaper $94.49 HDMI Sync Box from Wiz, one other Signify model—each produced rather more localized lighting and aren’t simply cheaper than the Play Wall Washer on their very own, and neither requires you to purchase the rest to sync along with your TV. Their colours are much more in-your-face than the Play Wall Washers, which is an effective factor for some folks, and for those who don’t prefer it, there are methods to tone issues down of their respective apps.

They every have their very own drawbacks, although: Govee’s equipment requires hanging an unsightly digital camera from the highest of your TV to seize coloration data, and the lights lag behind the image barely (for what it’s price, the corporate does sell a Sync Box with specs just like the Philips Hue Sync Field 8K), and the Wiz Sync Field solely has a single HDMI enter and is proscribed to 4K decision at 60Hz or 1440p at 120Hz. And sticking an LED strip to the again of your TV is a ache in each instances.

See Philips Hue Play Wall Washer at Amazon

Nice for adornment if your home was designed by Apple

However perhaps you’re solely within the Play Wall Washer as an ornamental merchandise. Good for you; you’ll save slightly cash, and the Play Wall Washer’s potential to wash a broad floor in colourful gentle is superb. The candy spot, to me, began at a couple of foot from a wall, letting me coat the all of it the way in which as much as the ceiling. You’ll be able to go together with static lights or gradients—the Hue app has a ton of good pre-made ones, however it’s also possible to roll your personal with a coloration picker within the app—or you may select from a number of results like those who different colourful Hue bulbs and lightstrips use. My favourite was Cosmic Gold, which alternately undulates gentle in entrance of and above the lamp, blasts coloration in every single place, and shortly dials the brightness all the way in which down in a fluid, repeating animation.

Sadly, it’s arduous to search out someplace to truly put it. It’s meant to be stood on a tough floor—both your ground or a desk—and with the sunshine pointing upward, every part finally ends up being underlit, casting harsh shadows if the sunshine encounters any texture or decorations, making it arduous for me to discover a wall it could work on. Its energy twine is a beneficiant 6.2-feet lengthy, however it’s embedded, quite than utilizing one thing like USB-C, so that you want a cumbersome extension twine if it doesn’t attain. Additionally, there aren’t any mounting screw holes, so that you’d need to get artistic if you wish to put it anyplace aside from the ground or a bit of furnishings.

The one hope for it in my home was my bed room, which is a transformed attic with partitions which are solely briefly vertical earlier than angling to observe the roofline. The sunshine coated your complete 15-foot size of the wall with vibrant, clean gradients, and the angled wall helped with furnishings shadows and stored the sunshine from fading because it climbed increased. However the Play Wall Washer was smack in the course of my bed room ground, proper within the walkway and able to journey me. Finally, for those who don’t have tons of house and an Apple-like minimalist sensibility, it’s arduous to see this sensible gentle being sensible for adornment exterior of one thing like an artwork gallery.

Sensible house compatibility Issues

If in case you have a Hue Bridge to attach it to, the Play Wall Washer will get help for Matter, the common protocol that lets your system work throughout any of the main sensible house platforms. That strategy—utilizing a hub as an alternative of giving the sunshine Matter compatibility by itself—means I didn’t need to do something after setup to get it working in Apple Residence, Google Residence, my Flic Hub, and Amazon Alexa; it was simply already there. With no Hue Bridge, it’ll solely work with the final two in that record. That might be superb within the brief time period, but when some slick new platform emerges down the highway, there’s far much less probability this gentle might be supported with out Matter.

No matter your platform of alternative is, you’ll nonetheless wish to use the Hue app, because it’s the one approach to make the Play Wall Washer present gradients. It’s additionally the place you’ll discover Hue’s numerous automations, like presence-mimicking that may randomly flip your lights on and off at night time while you’re away, or geofencing that toggles them off or on while you depart or come house. The Play Wall Washer is definitely very nice with the Hue wake-up automation, which turns it slowly over an extended stretch, as a result of it may be each extraordinarily dim and really vivid. That lengthy wall I discussed earlier? It was good to shut my curtains and get up to it completely bathed within the colours of a dawn.

The Philips Hue tax

The $219.99 Hue Play Wall Washer is a very cool little sensible lamp that’s sufficiently small that it gained’t name consideration to itself past the luxurious colours it produces. It’s not low cost, however for house decor functions, the value could also be proper, as long as you could have a giant ol’ wall to shine its gentle onto and the house to maintain it from being underfoot.

As a TV-syncing gentle, it is perhaps too subdued and imprecise for many individuals, and it’s restricted to TVs which are positioned slightly away from the wall in order for you even lighting from a single Play Wall Washer. However even for those who do like its vibe and tremendous straightforward setup, the prices ramp means as much as unlock that performance, requiring you to purchase {hardware} that prices rather more than the sunshine itself or have one in every of only a few particular TV units that may do it for you, assuming you have already got a Hue Bridge. Provided that the market is completely awful with TV backlight choices, it could be greatest to avoid wasting your cash and skip the Hue Play Wall Washer.

See Philips Hue Play Wall Washer at Amazon