A Spendy TV Glow-up for Film Evening at Dwelling

I lately went down a brilliant, 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 manner trendy 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 bought on the concept but, however the excellent news is that’s not all this little can filled 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 manner to boost your leisure system. But it surely’s equally adept as wall-coating accent lighting or a wake-up mild 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 tasks mild outward and upward from three rows of LED lights, every working to supply easy gradients and colours which can be wealthy with out being garishly oversaturated, which I’ve all the time appreciated about the entire Hue sensible mild line.

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

Increasing your TV’s colours

Signify calls the Play Wall Washer an “immersive encompass lighting” expertise to your house leisure heart. The sensible mild’s product web page exhibits two Play Wall Washers standing astride a large 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 realize what Philips’ picture exhibits, but it surely ain’t a lot simpler in your pockets with only one Play Wall Washer. You may skip the Sync Field 8K (or the older $249.99 4K model) you probably 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 are able to’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 need a Hue Bridge if you happen to’re not doing the TV-syncing factor—you may nonetheless use it as a elaborate gradient-beaming mild through the Hue app over Bluetooth—however you’ll additionally lose Matter help, limiting your sensible house ecosystem choices to simply Google Dwelling 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 cross 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 may change inputs through the Hue app, however I discovered I by no means wanted to; its computerized input-switching after I turned on one other gadget was flawless. It additionally helps Dolby Imaginative and prescient and HDR10 video.

Setup within the Hue app is pretty fast and painless, involving a bit of QR code-scanning and, for the Sync Field, tapping the button in your Hue Bridge and utilizing a bit of 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 primary benefit the Play Wall Washer has over protecting the again of your TV with RGB built-in circuit (RGBIC) mild strips—the sort 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 accomplished. The drawback is that it being a single mild supply meansit’ll solid harsh shadows if there’s something mounted on the wall above it. LED strips don’t actually have that problem.

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 crimson and orange within the sundown sequence of The Incredibles, as Mrs. Unbelievable races to avoid wasting a commuter bullet practice from sure doom. However the mild 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 after 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, not less than for gaming—I’d even say I loved the spectacle. Films are introduced as a bit of artwork meant to scrub over you, however video video games are inherently participatory—the way you expertise their tales is as much as you, and for me not less than, a synchronized mild present feels extra additive than distracting.

So, worth and precision are the Play Wall Washer’s massive weak factors. I A/B examined it in opposition to the $149.99 Govee TV Backlight 3 Lite Kit (see the GIFs above), which makes use of an LED strip and two mild bars, and the even cheaper $94.49 HDMI Sync Box from Wiz, one other Signify model—each produced way more localized lighting and aren’t simply cheaper than the Play Wall Washer on their very own, and neither requires you to purchase anything to sync together with your TV. Their colours are much more in-your-face than the Play Wall Washers, which is an effective factor for some individuals, and if you happen to 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 package requires hanging an unsightly digicam from the highest of your TV to seize coloration data, and the lights lag behind the image barely (for what it’s value, 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 restricted 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 circumstances.

See Philips Hue Play Wall Washer at Amazon

Nice for adornment if your home was designed by Apple

However possibly you’re solely within the Play Wall Washer as an ornamental merchandise. Good for you; you’ll save a bit of cash, and the Play Wall Washer’s means to wash a broad floor in colourful mild is superb. The candy spot, to me, began at a few foot from a wall, letting me coat the all of it the way in which as much as the ceiling. You may go together with static lights or gradients—the Hue app has a ton of good pre-made ones, however you may also roll your individual with a coloration picker within the app—or you may select from a number of results like people who different colourful Hue bulbs and lightstrips use. My favourite was Cosmic Gold, which alternately undulates mild 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 flooring or a desk—and with the sunshine pointing upward, every little thing 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 might work on. Its energy twine is a beneficiant 6.2-feet lengthy, but it surely’s embedded, relatively 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 must get inventive if you wish to put it wherever 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 can be solely briefly vertical earlier than angling to comply with the roofline. The sunshine lined the whole 15-foot size of the wall with vibrant, easy gradients, and the angled wall helped with furnishings shadows and saved the sunshine from fading because it climbed larger. However the Play Wall Washer was smack in the midst of my bed room flooring, proper within the walkway and able to journey me. In the end, if you happen to don’t have tons of area and an Apple-like minimalist sensibility, it’s arduous to see this sensible mild being sensible for adornment exterior of one thing like an artwork gallery.

Good house compatibility Issues

When you’ve got a Hue Bridge to attach it to, the Play Wall Washer will get help for Matter, the common protocol that lets your gadget work throughout any of the most important sensible house platforms. That method—utilizing a hub as an alternative of giving the sunshine Matter compatibility by itself—means I didn’t must do something after setup to get it working in Apple Dwelling, Google Dwelling, 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 checklist. That may very well be nice within the quick time period, but when some slick new platform emerges down the street, there’s far much less probability this mild will probably be supported with out Matter.

No matter your platform of selection is, you’ll nonetheless need 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 once you’re away, or geofencing that toggles them off or on once you go away 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 brilliant. 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 plush colours it produces. It’s not low cost, however for house decor functions, the value could also be proper, as long as you’ve an enormous ol’ wall to shine its mild onto and the area to maintain it from being underfoot.

As a TV-syncing mild, it could be too subdued and imprecise for many individuals, and it’s restricted to TVs which can be positioned a bit of away from the wall if you’d like even lighting from a single Play Wall Washer. However even if you happen to do like its vibe and tremendous simple setup, the prices ramp manner as much as unlock that performance, requiring you to purchase {hardware} that prices way more than the sunshine itself or have considered one 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 finest to avoid wasting your cash and skip the Hue Play Wall Washer.

See Philips Hue Play Wall Washer at Amazon