Philips Hue Play Light Bar: Review

Hey guys Mike here the Detroit Borg checking out something new from Philips hue so this is the new play light bar this is sort of an alternative to something like the hue lightstrip or the bloom it really caught my interest here because it looks like a great solution for an entertainment center or for a desktop setup so I thought I'd try it out to see how it compared next to a light strip so you can buy this in a 2-pack for 129 or a single bar for 69 now these are available in white or black and the only version that was available to me was black which i think is actually perfect for my setup now

What makes this light bar kind of interesting is how flexible it is we have several mounting options so instead of having to cut a light strip and gluing it on to the back of your monitor or your desk instead you can reposition these to cast light on the wall either in a vertical stance or on a horizontal stance and we'll show you that in just a moment now these are RGB fixtures so they can produce about 16 million different colors but these can also match your existing white hue lights so they can cover the light spectrum from 2,000 to 6,500 K now each light bar is

About 10 inches long so they're about roughly the size of a set of desktop speakers they're small enough to be hidden behind objects so it's such as other speakers or behind the TV but they're probably too thick to be placed behind the TV mounted on the wall the back of each light bar is actually angled and that's because you could use these without the mounting stands so if you just want to sort of cast light up on the wall you can also just lay these on the surface and sort of tilt them toward the wall the accessories in the box include two types of stands one for

A tabletop and the other for the back of a TV specifically any surface that you can use adhesive on so in the separate bag we get 3m adhesive strips along with an Allen wrench and the screws for mounting those brackets we also get a power supply which has three outputs so you can have up to three bars on here at a time the back of each light bar has two mounting points one for the center and one toward the bottom where the cable is in both brackets are designed to work in either location so like all hue lights as soon as you plug them in they power on to a soft white light but

Actually we want to connect it to the hue app so we can control their brightness color and much more so once we're all connected to the hue app you can highly customize the color output and brightness of the hue play bars so just like any other Hulett you can sync the see your existing light fixtures or highly customized them separately but something much more interesting to do with these is that you can sync the colors to your monitor and this is especially useful for something that can be used in a desktop setup so this works

With an app running on Mac or PC and does require that the lights be set up in an entertainment environment so you do that within the hue app so once you've set up the entertainment environment you basically specify where each light fixture is located so in my case I have the to play bars and the light strip on the back of my desk so I just tell it where those specific items are so once it knows where they are it knows how to sync those colors to what you're seeing on your display now there is some degree of lag here but it's mostly noticeable when you're looking

Only at the lights and not at the monitor so most the time you're just staring directly at the monitor and the lights are sort of flashing around it I found this extremely easy to set up and there's something you have to turn on and turn off but you can see it changes both the color and the brightness of the fixtures and overall it's a really neat effect it certainly works much better than something like a light strip overall the effect here is really impressive it has quite a bit more dimension to work with than a simple light strip on the back of your desk or

TV this also works on a TV but it does require an HDMI adaptor which is something I hope to try out soon and if you guys want to see that video let me know in the comments section now compare it to my light strip which was the first generation which is a little dimmer you can see that these fixtures are quite a bit brighter obviously the lumen output is also quite a bit brighter when you have two of these compared to a single light strip well obviously the light strip is much more discreet and low-profile and can be applied in locations that these cannot

Now just to compare the four main configurations of these lights in the upper left corner we have the mounted directly on the back of the monitor this is by far the most discreet and diffused light you can get but it's also not as dramatic as the other configurations in the upper right they're laying directly on a table with no brackets and just tilt it toward the wall the only problem with this configuration is that it's pretty easy to see the light source directly so it can be a little blinding and the to tabletop configurations on the bottom are reflecting the most light

But actually there's a lot more hardware to look at in the end there are far more ways in which these light bars can be used it can be used as accent lighting around your house you can use them on top of cabinets to lay the artwork or just to place them around your home decor so you definitely don't need to use these on your desktop or home theater setup there are many more uses for them alright guys hope you enjoyed this quick look at the hue play bars I wasn't expecting to do this video but I'm always excited to cover a human they come up especially ones that I think

Might be interesting to you guys if you guys enjoyed this video please let me know with a like and I'll see you again in my next video