Philips Hue Play Gradient 55″ Smart TV Light Strip – Flowing Multicolor LED Color-Changing TV BackLight – Sync with TV, Music, and Gaming – Requires Bridge and Sync Box – Control with App or Voice

What you probably don’t know…
It does what you expect. On top of the Gradient Lightstrip for my TV, I also bought the play bars. You can isolate each light into individual colors. If you’re not new to the LED scene, then know you should be familiar with setting scenes with the app.When everything arrived, I immediately started setting up. The first problem I had was connecting the bridge to the internet. The first two lights came on but not the third. Without being connected to the internet, I can’t access the bridge with the app or move on with the rest of the installation. The solution to that, was that I plugged the network cable it came with from the bridge to the splitter I have. Come to find out, the bridge doesn’t work with splitters. Technically, the protocol doesn’t allow for it. You have to directly connect it to the router.I have a 70 inch Samsung Smart TV. I bought the 65” light strip. After setting up all the lights, the bridge, and the sync box, I was excited to play something colorful like Avatar or Spiderman(across the spiderverse). So, having smart tv and all I had to do was press the Netflix button on my remote and it brings me to the TV app(There’s a reason I say that) BUT, starting a movie, the lights just dimmed to the lowest white light and they were not synced to what was being shown on screen. The app kept showing me that nothing was connected to the sync box. I of course didn’t understand if I connect my tv to the box. After hours of research, I’ve done everything I could from getting different HDMI cables, to switching ends, to factory resetting the sync box, to seeing if my tv needed to be updated. I was afraid I bought a defective sync box. My last last thing to try was to call customer support. Surprisingly, after dialing the number, less than 5 minutes, I was on the phone with someone, which is impressive.Come to find out… to have lights sync, you can’t use it with TV Applications. You have to have a second source such as a PlayStation, Xbox, Firestick and so on. After learning that, I connected my PlayStation to the sync box, went to a YouTube video and it worked.So if you’re having this same issue, hopefully I was able to help someone out. Looking it up, I wasn’t the only one stumped with this same problem.All in all, after I got it to work, it’s amazing! The lights on top of a surround sound system, you don’t have to go to the movies anymore. You have an enhanced theater right in front of you. If you’re not watching TV, you can still work the lights with the app and either set a scene or choose whatever color(s) you prefer.It’s expensive for no reason. But you get what you pay for and that’s quality. You won’t be disappointed.P.S. The Bridge, Sync Box, and the Lights all use a big box plug. The blocky ones. So I had to utilize another power strip to get everything plugged in and working on top of everything I already had plugged.

Surprisingly accurate
The Hue Sync experience is truly fun. I can’t speak to the HDMI box because I use a PC, but I have a 77 inch LG G1 and I was pleasantly surprised at how accurate the light representation is. I’ve ran a large number of light show programs to test where and when the colors change and it is pretty spot on accurately changing colors exactly as it does on screen in the exact same spot. I was worried because it only has 7 light zones (2 on each side and 3 on top) but I’ve almost never noticed it not changing perfectly in sync with what is displayed. The very few times it has been off have been with a grueling spinning color wheel test image or other purposefully demanding content. Even then it is only by a little and you have to be looking for it, in normal use you will never see it miss even when looking for it. My TV is wall mounted and I didn’t even have to take it off the mount. My only issue is it doesn’t cover the bottom of the screen and Philips doesn’t offer any solutions to cover that area that are as competent as the strip. I even purchased the Gradient Ambient Light Strip thinking it would do the job since it is basically the exact same product only without a preinstalled diffuser, but that turned out to be the only disappointing Hue product I have purchased. The Gradient Ambient light strip just doesn’t work well with sync at all. It has 3 zones and depending on how you have it set up (where it is located in your room) it can display the wrong side of the screen or even have one zone that doesn’t even work at all (either just a white light or it’s off). Considering that one strip cost me 200 dollars I was pretty miffed about this and their customer support is very lacking. After days of talking to customer support on Facebook of all the hated places (I can’t call as they are closed when I am home and they literally don’t have an email address) they finally got back to me with a simple “we are aware of the problem”. The Hue Play Bars work surprisingly well but it can be a pain to place their location in the app to get them to display colors properly. But this review is about the Gradient Lightstrip not the company, and that as a stand alone product works very, very well. So if you can live with no lights on the bottom, fighting to get a workaround solution you can live with considering it will never be as good as the rest of the screen, or it isn’t an issue for you at all it is a must buy. As far as brightness goes it is plenty bright in my opinion, usable even in daylight as long as you close the blinds (I have normal wooden slat blinds not blackout blinds by any means) and the light shines across my entire wall and up into the ceiling or to the side and off the side wall. In fact yow will probably want to turn it down quite a bit as the light can be so bright it’s distracting from the actual content. The music sync feature needs work though. It could benefit from some options as it seems pretty random what part of the music it reacts to, and with multiple lights it’s hard to tell what part of the music any given light is reacting to.

The product came well packaged and the stick-on supports for attaching the strip to the TV work very well supporting it as required around the back of the TV and is easily connected and the bridge detects the available connections. Simple to use and when you set up the selection App we did it on an iPad and phone and both worked very well giving a wide variety of combined colors and effects. for what we needed it offers both bright back ground light during the day around the TV or dim light when watching later in the evening to enjoy your favorite show or film.We have not set up all the variations or linked it to react to the show so just getting used to having a nice controllable light surrounding the TV to give a relaxing evening or day time film.Would highly recommend

Funciona bastante bien, buen brillo y todas las opciones de configuracion para diferentes tipos de iluminado son buenas. Para este modo basico no es necesario el bridge ni el sync box. Entiendo lo que podria ofrecer con esa configuracion, mas no se si cambios de luces de acuerdo al contenido valgan otros 10k pesos.