Next you’ll do the outside corners, and then finish things off with the bottom parts. Philips advises that you start from the top middle – there are even little arrows on the middle of the light strip to help you place it – so that you don’t end up with a lopsided placement and have to re do it. Then you can peel off the 3M tape and stick it on to your TV. Often times there will be cutouts for inputs or ventilation towards the outsides of the back of the panel so be sure to verify that you’re not covering anything inadvertently.

Note: Philips Ambilight TVs also omit lights from the bottom side of the panel.īefore attaching the lightstrip you should make sure to clean the back of your TV, and also see how you’re going to route the bottom pieces. I found that I didn’t really miss the bottom light that much but if you just cannot fathom not having bottom lights, you could always add a Play Bar or two. Especially if you take into the account that many people keep their TVs on a media console or stand of some sort, in which case the bottom lights would be useless.Įven with my wall mounted setup, my soundbar is attached to the mount, so it would hide a bit of the lights. Coming from an engineering background, if I had to guess, Philips tested out iterations with lights all the way around, and without the bottom, and probably found that this was a better solution. That’s right, this gradient lightstrip only covers three of the four sides of your TV, the bottom has no lights at all. There are five channel guides for the light strip, two corner pieces that bend at 45 degrees, and three flat pieces that connect at the top middle of the TV, and at the bottom left and right sides, making it into a big “n” shape. This means that it is also pointing out at a 45 degree angle, so no matter how close your TV is to the wall, it will shine outwards giving you the best effect, rather than if it was just pointing straight at the wall.Īdding the light strip to the back of the TV wasn’t particularly difficult, though it is good to know that if you plug the power supply into the adapter, and open the Hue App to add the light strip, it will show you a video of how to properly add it to the back of the TV, instead of just following the instructions in the booklet provided. It is already in a diffused enclosure, that has a V shape with rubber on the outside so that it can snuggly fit within the routing channels. The lightstrip itself feels very high quality. In the box you will find the light strip coiled up, the power adapter, and the channels that stick to the back of the TV for routing the light strip. Getting it up and running is pretty straight forward. You won’t be able to sync any external sources like game consoles or streaming boxes this way however, you’ll need the HDMI Sync Box to accomplish that. The HDMI Sync Box isn’t a necessity per se, as you can connect this to the Hue Sync app on Windows or Mac, if you happen to use a HTPC as your home media controller. In order to get it up and running you will need a Hue Bridge. Neither of those solutions are going to give us what we want though, and that is color sync’d ambient lighting (yes I know there are 3rd party solutions, but we’re looking at native support here). You can even go down the DIY method with cheap LED strips and a zigbee controller from AliExpress if you just wanted to have gradient colors. This in and of itself isn’t new or revolutionary, competitors like Lifx have had this with their lightstrips, and even their single bulbs for years now. It is specifically designed to go behind your TV – in fact it is sold in terms of screen size, 55”, 65”, 75” – and as the name suggests, it can output color gradients, ie it shows multiple colors on the same lightstrip. The Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip is here to finally address this horrible first world problem that we’ve been having. And even if you spend hundreds more on more lights, you were still being limited to a single color at a time. While I gave the device a generally good review, I did acknowledge that even the least expensive setup would cost you close to $400, and that would only get you two lights, for either side of the TV. Last years HDMI Sync Box release took it up a notch by allowing you to natively synchronize the colors on your TV with your lights (it has to be external input to intercept the signal). The Hue Gradient Lightstrip is part of the “Hue Play” lineup of devices, that are primarily designed to be utilized in the living room area as colorful accent lighting.

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