The idea of LED TV backlighting that syncs with the action on screen has been around for a long while now. Philips popularised the concept with its Ambilight TVs, and many manufacturers have attempted to offer DIY versions that can work with any TV.
The latest to have a crack at it is Nanoleaf, a brand that rose to popularity offering geometric LED wall panels that adorn the walls of countless Twitch streamers and YouTube creators. Obviously, Nanoleaf knows a thing or two about LED tech, as well as having one of the best apps in the business, so I’ve got high hopes for its 4D Screen Mirror Lightstip Kit.
The best part, for existing Nanoleaf users, is that you can extend the effects to mirror across the rest of your Nanoleaf lighting – creating a “surround sound” lighting effect for your living room. I was excited to see how it performs in the real world, so I’ve been living with it for the past few weeks, here’s how I got on.
Nanoleaf
Nanoleaf 4D Screen Mirror Lightstrip Kit
Recommended
Nanoleaf’s 4D Screen Mirror Lightstrip Kit comes at a reasonable price and adds impressive and accurate synchronised backlighting to your TV. The ability to sync with other Nanoleaf products and broad support for smart home ecosystems serves to sweeten the deal.
Pros
- Excellent brightness and colour vibrancy
- Great response time and accuracy
- Easy set-up and installation
- One of the best apps in the category
- Works with HomeKit, Google Home and Alexa
Cons
- Looks unusual having a camera on your TV
- Reflections can be picked up by the lighting
What’s in the box
- Two versions available: Up to 65-inch and up to 85-inch
- Trimmable lightstrip, control box, camera and power adapter
- Camera mount, curved corner guides and adhesive pads
The are two versions of the kit available, one that’s designed for TVs up to 65 inches and another for up to 85-inch sets. If you have a smaller TV, as I do, then there’s nothing to worry about, the lightstrip can be cut at marked locations about 2 inches apart that run the entire length of the strip.
In the box you get the strip itself, in one continuous run spooled onto a reel, its control box, a camera with a privacy cover and mount and a power adapter. There are also some adhesive pads and moulded plastic corner guides to allow the strip to smoothly bend around the corners without needing to be cut.
Setup and configuration
Installing the 4D lightstrip kit is a pretty simple process. First, you’ll need to apply some double-sided adhesive pads to the corner guides and attach them to the rear of your TV in each corner. Then, you stick the self-adhesive LED strip around the perimeter of your TV, ensuring that the cable terminates towards the bottom. Once it’s in place, you can cut off the excess length at one of the marked points with some scissors – or if you have a 65/85-inch TV you might find that it’s the perfect length already.
The camera can either sit below your TV, pointing up at the screen, or sit above the screen using the included mount, which attaches like your typical webcam bracket. The idea is that if your TV is wall mounted, then you can use the mount, and if your TV is on a stand, the camera can sit below the TV for a more seamless look.
My TV is on a stand, but it’s a small stand, and I found it wasn’t long enough to properly position the camera below the display. So I ended up using the top mount, which is much more noticeable and has a bit of a weird look, but you quickly get used to it and eventually forget that it’s there.
Once everything is in place, you can connect everything to the control box and plug it into the wall for power. Then, the rest of the setup takes place in the application.
Just as with the physical install, the in-app setup was very straightforward. The most difficult part was finding the QR code on the packaging, and once I had scanned it in the Nanoleaf app, the on-screen instructions guided me through the rest.
First, you tell the app where the camera is positioned, and then you assign each corner of the TV to a corresponding section of the strip. This is shown by areas of the strip illuminating in real-time, and you can push them around with an onscreen rotary control. It’s very intuitive, and there’s even some haptic feedback when you adjust it – which might not be necessary but gives the experience a premium and polished feel.
Then, you’ll be asked to place a border around your TV using a screenshot from the camera, which just involves moving some handles to the edges of the screen. Ideally, you want to put a bright image on the screen so it’s easier to tell it apart from the bezels, but it’s easy enough and only takes a minute.
App and smart home integration
Once the setup is complete, you’re treated to the usual Nanoleaf app experience, and you’ll be quite familiar if you’ve used the brand’s other products. The difference with this product is that there are additional options for screen mirroring effects, something that hasn’t been possible with previous Nanoleaf releases.
If you select the lightstrip in the app, you’re given some basic controls at the top of your screen to toggle the lights on and off as well as adjust the brightness, and it also displays the current mode. Underneath, there are three tabs that offer more granular control, named Basic, 4D and Scene.
The Basic tab gives you a large colour wheel, and you can select an area to make the entire LED strip display a singular colour. There’s also a toggle that will turn it into colour temperature mode, which essentially means you can choose between a cool blue-ish white and a warm yellowy white, and anything in between. Down at the bottom of the page, there are eight quick-access colours to choose from.
Going into the 4D tab, things get a little more interesting. This is where the screen mirroring effects are controlled, and we’ll go into more detail about each of them in the next section. Essentially, you can select between 1D, 2D, 3D and 4D and the mirroring effect gets more complex and accurate the higher you go. There’s also a button to enable Sync+ which shares the effect with other Nanoleaf lights in your home, and you can adjust the vibrancy of the colours at the bottom.
Switching over to the scene tab, here you will see a list of preset modes created by Nanoleaf and its community. These range from simple solid colours to complex animations, and there are plenty of sound-reactive modes, too. You can also create your own custom scenes, browse community-created scenes, or generate a scene using a keyword with Nanoleaf’s AI Magic Scene feature.
One of Nanoleaf’s big selling points, when compared to other brands offering similar products, is that it offers compatibility with all of the main smart home ecosystems. This includes Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, IFTTT and even Razer Chroma.
I’m a Google Home user and adding the Nanoleaf 4D kit to my home was as easy as can be. You simply hit the plus button to add a device, choose “Works with Google” from the list, and add Nanoleaf as a service. Then, all of your Nanoleaf products will appear in the app ready to be controlled directly and added to your automations.
Of course, for full control and access to all the available lighting modes and scenes, you’ll need to stick to the proper Nanoleaf app. But, if you just want Google Home to quickly toggle the lights on and off, then they’ll stay on the most recent setting that was applied in the Nanoleaf app – and that works fine for my needs.
Performance
I’ll start by saying that my TV setup isn’t exactly optimal for this type of product. The TV is placed diagonally in the corner with different coloured walls on each side – it’d work best flat against a single wall. Despite that fact, the Nanoleaf 4D lightstrip gives off a really impressive effect. It can get exceptionally bright if you want it to, and the effects react instantaneously to the action on screen.
There are two preset vibrancy modes, Cinematic or Vivid, as well as a third custom option. The Vivid mode, although quite striking, was too saturated for my tastes and I found that it distracted from what was going on on the TV, whereas the more accurate colour rendition of the Cinematic mode felt much more immersive.
However, with both of these modes, the colour temperature is on the warm side by default – so if you have a fully white screen, the backlighting will look a little more yellow by comparison. It looks nice, but I wanted it to match more closely, so I dove into the custom mode to see what I could do. After lots of tinkering, I landed on a white balance of 3668K, and that seemed to match almost exactly. You also get sliders for dynamic range and saturation, and I found that I liked the dynamic range to be on 7 and saturation at about 70 – but your mileage may vary based on your personal preference, ambient lighting and wall colour. The important thing is that it’s super easy to tweak.
As I mentioned earlier, there are four levels of screen mirroring to choose from, named 1D to 4D, and each reacts to your TV content slightly differently. 1D, as you might have guessed, is the least reactive. The backlight stays white and the brightness pulses in sync with the onscreen visuals. It’s a nice subtle effect if you don’t feel like having colours shooting across your wall.
2D mirrors one colour at a time, picking out the most dominant one, and it pulses in the same way. While 3D mirrors multiple colours, but not in sync with the on-screen location, they’re just kind of dotted about – the effect is okay but it’s a little random, and this is the mode that I used the least during my testing.
Finally, we have 4D, which is the proper screen mirroring mode, most similar to Philips Ambilight. It’s my favourite, and the positioning, colour accuracy and speed exceeded my expectations. The last product I tested in this realm was the Govee AI Gaming Sync Box, which used HDMI capture rather than a camera, and I expected to notice some latency with the Nanoleaf system but that was not the case at all. It reacts almost exactly as fast, and the positioning of the lighting effects feels even more accurate, somehow.
I noticed that heavily letterboxed content doesn’t work as well, and the effect will be missing from the top and bottom of the lightstrip. You can, of course, jump into the app and change the monitoring area to match the letterbox, but it’d be nice if there was a way to do this automatically. In fairness, I noticed the same thing with Govee’s HDMI sync box, so it’s not just camera-based options that suffer from this – and at least there’s a workaround in this case.
Each mode can also be set to be music reactive, so as well as synchronising with the on-screen content, it will also pulsate with the volume of the soundtrack. It’s a pretty cool effect, and works great with things like music videos, but it’s a bit much for casual movie watching. It’s the kind of thing that’d work great for a party, though.
If you have other Nanoleaf products in your home, you can enable Sync+, which allows you to sync portions of the backlighting with your other lights. I tested it with Nanoleaf’s Ultra Black Hexagons, which were positioned on my right-hand side, just in my peripheral vision. The effect works well, synchronising instantaneously, and matching the colours of the lightstrip on its corresponding side.
Unfortunately, I found this effect way too distracting for movie or TV watching, it’s just not for me. Again, if you’ve just got some visual ambience playing for a party, then it’s a cool effect having all of your lights synced, but it pulled my eyes away from the screen when I was trying to watch something.
Verdict
The Nanonleaf 4D Screen Mirror Lightstrip Kit is quite competitively priced at $99.99/£89.99, and if you’re already in the Nanoleaf lighting ecosystem, it’s extremely easy to recommend. While there are numerous products that do the same thing for a similar price, the app is the best that I’ve used and the setup was the most hassle-free, and these are two of the most important aspects of a product like this.
Of course, it has to look great, too, and it certainly does. The brightness, colour rendering and reaction times are second to none. Plus, integration with all of the major smart home systems serves to sweeten the deal.
The system isn’t perfect, there are shortcomings that come with using a camera-based system like this. If you have a bright room, then reflections on the TV can be picked up by the backlighting, and the same goes if you have a brightly coloured TV stand. There’s also the fact that it just looks a bit weird having a camera up there, though that will bother some more than others.
On the plus side, the Nanoleaf 4D kit is significantly cheaper than an HDMI sync box like the Philips Hue Play or Govee AI, and works just as well in the majority of situations. If you’re keen on the idea of adaptive TV backlighting, and especially if you own some other Nanoleaf products, then this is a fantastic option.