PHILLIPS HUE SYNC TV
This creates a bit of a disconnect with the whole “extra immersion” thing-especially if you mount your TV on the wall.Phillips Hue App for Hue Light is an application released by Smart Widget Labs Co Ltd, a famous publisher on Google Play. The Gradient Lightstrip only covers the sides and top of the TV, so you don’t get color from the bottom. While the Immersion may not be as accurate, it has one feature the Gradient doesn’t: It goes all the way around the TV. I like the Govee Immersion, but it can’t hold a candle to what the Play Gradient Lightstrip can do in terms of brightness, vibrancy, and accuracy. The accuracy is spot on, and the way they flow with the TV is perfect. This allows the colors to weave in and out of each other as they ebb and flow with your TV’s picture. Instead of just a simple, flat strip of LEDs, it’s a fat, flexible snake of lights with a built-in diffuser. The Play Gradient Lightstrip is slightly different from the company’s other lightstrips because it’s designed specifically to go on the back of a TV.Īs such, the style is pretty different. Philips Hue makes some of the best, most vibrant smart lights on the market, and its lightstrips are no different. Philips Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip: Absolutely Gorgeous Cameron Summerson You’ll need to add an external source, making this already expensive setup even pricier. Because this relies on an HDMI input, so your TV’s built-in Roku (or whatever OS it runs) isn’t compatible. Oh, and if you use your TV’s built-in OS, you can kiss that goodbye-at least if you want to use the lights.
PHILLIPS HUE SYNC 1080P
The system doesn’t currently support 120Hz gaming but will get an update to enable this, though it will downgrade 120Hz content to 1080p because of HDMI 2.0 limitations. I have no idea why this isn’t enabled by default.Īll that is on top of the fact that the Sync Box uses HDMI 2.0, so all of your HDMI 2.1 devices will get downgraded the second you plug them into the Sync Box.
Fortunately, there’s a setting buried in the Automatic Control Options that will turn the sync on when it detects an input source. You have to open the app and manually start the sync every time the box is woken from sleep. Once everything is up and running, you’d expect the lights to just work, right? Lol, nah. My wife has been begging me to write this review so we can get rid of the box. This is what my family has dealt with every single day since I installed the Sync Box. Except you always have to be involved when someone wants to watch TV because you’re the only person with access to the app and no one else understands how the damn Sync Box works in the first place. Take that scenario and apply it to everyone in your household. Now you can finally watch TV or play a game or whatever. You re-open the app to find out what’s going on and see that it, in fact, detects the source, but it didn’t change to that input. Or maybe it just sits on the last-used source, waiting for a signal. Once it’s awake, maybe it detects the signal from your source.
You can’t wake it from the app, so you have to get up and press the button on the front of the box. So, you open the app to see what’s going on and realize the Sync Box is still in sleep mode. The TV says it can’t detect a signal because the Sync Box didn’t turn on.
Now, here’s how it actually plays out: You turn on the TV and your streaming box, console, or whatever source you plan on using. The Sync Box detects the signal, kicks out of sleep mode, and pushes that content to the TV’s screen. Here’s how it’s supposed to play out: You turn on the TV and your streaming box, console, or whatever source you plan on using. The good news is that it doesn’t work any better once everything is set up and connected. I ended up using 3M picture hangers to mount the brackets to the back of my TV, which not only worked better but will make it easier to remove these from the TV. Except the double-sided tape that comes with the mounting brackets is pretty crappy, so it doesn’t really hold. The lights are easy enough to install, as you just stick them to the back of your TV. If I bought this for my parents, for example, there’s no possible way they would’ve been able to get it set up. It’s easy enough if you already know what you’re doing, but I can see how this incredible unintuitive experience could be a nightmare for someone who isn’t tech savvy. I have no idea why it has its own app, but I can tell you that I’m not a fan of installing two apps for the same product line.Īnd then there’s the setup process.
PHILLIPS HUE SYNC INSTALL
So you can imagine my surprise when I had to install a second app-the Hue Sync App ( Android/ iOS)-just for the Sync Box.
Because of that, I’m pretty familiar with the Hue app. I have at last one Hue light in every room of my house, and my whole family loves them. I’ve been using Philips Hue bulbs for years.