Play White and Colour Ambiance Smart Light Bar Double Pack Base Unit, Entertainment Lighting for TV and Gaming (Works with Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple HomeKit), Black

The Hue Play Bar is fantastic: bright, vibrant lighting with endless customisation. A clear 5-star product. The only drawback is the included VHB adhesive strips — they’re very strong, and if you stick them directly to a monitor or delicate surface, removing them could damage the finish or even void the warranty. Great lights, just mount them carefully - yet, returned because of the adhesive, too complex to stick without it

I purchased these on Prime day as they were such a good price. At the time I wasn't sure where to place them for backlighting when watching TV or behind our bedside cabinets. If you haven't used Philips Hue before, then you're in for a real treat. Once setup with the required Hub (technically I don't think it is required, but the functionality is severely limited without it), it allows you to connect to a portable light-switch (use a light-switch cover available on Amazon), your phone, or controllable by asking Alexa/Google Home/Siri. The lights are well made, have a long life at 25,000 hours and mostly are bright with clear colours; my daughter loves 'Barbie Pink' in her bedroom. They're not the cheapest, but you certainly get what you pay for. This pack comes with two lights. These lights have a stand that allow you to stand them on their ends or on their sides depending on where you're placing them. The lights and the plastic on the lights is extremely good quality, but I do think the black plastic stands look a little cheap; especially on a white light surround. The set comes with a plug and adaptor that allows you to use this in either UK or the EU, there is a spare connector to plug a third light (sold separately) in the same socket. Helpfully the pack even has some 3M stickers the right size to allow you to mount them somewhere. I hope you found this review helpful!

Great ambiance lighting not sure worth the normal price but when they're on offer grab them, they work perfectly with alexa and have many mood and scene settings

Expensive for what they are, especially as you need the additional hue bridge to actually use them Good selection of lights, just a shame they aren’t as advanced as other brands where there is per-LED or per-section automation These lights can only be one colour at a time, and as a result don’t have any dynamic effects that are effective at all. This is really disappointing for the money. Additionally the stands have limited positioning options and are badly designed. You can have the light 3 ways - on the horizontal, facing straight up, on the horizontal to attach to the back of a monitor, or vertically. The big problem here is that when the stand is attached, there’s not enough relief around the cable, which could cause it to break in the long run. The bigger problem is, that to use these on a monitor, you have to use the 3M sticky pads (included). Now this would be fine if they gave you extras to reposition if needed (they don’t), but the stand is attached to the light with an Allen key bolt, the 3M tape then goes over this fixing and it’s stuck to the monitor. This means once it’s stuck on, the only way to change the position of the light (or remove it) is to rip the light off the monitor. You can’t just remove the light from the stand housing. Once you do this, you got an unusable 3M pad to clean off the stand and monitor casing - and you gotta do this without damaging your monitor I know I’m being picky, but for charging literally double what other companies charge, I expect the product to be better thought out You’re paying for the name and probably like 30-40% extra brightness over the competition

These things are great! I love all the Philips Hue range of light - but these are really cool. Full spectrum colour fittings, with awesome control capabilities. Can be used in so many settings and locations. I currently use them as a back light behind my computer screens (helps reduce eye-strain). This allows me to vary the brightness to get it just right. Also allows for some ambient lighting depending on circumstances, with the ability to choose just about any colour you like! :D They're not cheap - but they're just so good. The physical design allows for a variety of mounting options. Stand them up, lie them down, attach them to the rear of your telly (especially if used in conjunction with the Hue Sync box) and you have a great "bounce it off the walls" lighting option. They look great - but are best used where you can't actually see them, just the light they produce.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Hue Play Bars, but after setting them up behind the TV, I’m genuinely impressed. The colours are vibrant and smooth, and they make movie nights feel so much more immersive. The white light options are great too - perfect for normal lighting during the day. Setup was really straightforward with the Hue app, and they connected to my existing Hue Bridge straight away. I love being able to change the mood with voice control or a quick tap on my phone. They’re not cheap, but you definitely get what you pay for. The build quality is solid, and once you see them in action, it’s hard to go back to normal lighting.

Bought 6 light bars, three for the home theatre pc and three for my main gaming PC. Initially I had almost returned the whole order but later decided to keep them. The main reason was the price, I got the light bars on a sale and still they were very expensive, the light bars with hub cost almost £300. The Software: You have to install the app on your mobile and also an app on your PC. Confusingly you have to use both, the PC app controlling mostly sync related lighting and the mobile app for setup, light positioning, timers etc. Both apps work well, but there is some room for improvement. The good thing is that Philips hue have a large client base, so the software should continue to improve and mature. The latency: In my setup there is almost no discernable lag between what is happening on my monitor and when the lights react, I would estimate around 20-50ms. I am connected directly to my router via a lan cable and I am around 5m away from the hue hub. This can very quickly turn in to a different story if you are on slow wifi or worst yet, try to wirelessly cast/mirror your laptop display onto a TV. I think most complaints about latency online is with ppl doing exactly that. I did notice an option in the software to mitigate the issue, but did not need to use it. There is no substitute for a hard wired connection. It works like this. The app on your PC analyses the screen space and calculates average light values based on your lighting setup. This gets sent to the hue hub via your local network. The hue hub then sends the signals to the lights via the Bixby wireless protocol. The light bars: These are rather small but can produce a good amount of light. Rather than the amount of light, it is the quality of the light that surprised me. The warm and cool white light is amazing and it is obvious that some attention was given to colour reproduction. They must have RGB and two different kinds of white light LEDs inside. The diffuser is excellent quality too, I am not able to discern any individual spots of light inside the bar. There is nothing quite like starting up DOOM and having the whole room go a deep red colour! Quite nice indeed. There is one annoying aspect of the light bars, at full brightness they emit an electric buzzing sound. The buzzing sound is reduced in line with the brightness setting. This should not be an issue when seated a few meters from a TV or if there is any other noise in the room, but when sat at a desk close to the lights it is noticeable. To mitigate the issue I placed the light bars as far away from my seating position as possible and have them set to around 30% brightness when doing work or just browsing the net in a quiet room. If you are using headphones or have any other noise in the room then you can't hear any buzzing even at 100% brightness. To give you an idea, it is reminiscent of some older and cheaper type monitors that emit a buzzing sound because of PWM dimming. The hub: Nothing much to say here, find a decent spot for it and switch it on, have not had any issues with it. PC performance: There is overhead associated with analysing the screen space, calculating average colours and sending the data to the hue hub. I have a top spec PC with a 2080ti GPU, and using a gaming benchmark I noticed about a 5-8% performance decrease with hue sync enabled. For me this is not an issue, but it could be an issue on weaker hardware. Hue sync can be disabled or enabled on a game to game basis in the software as profiles. The competition: Asus Aura Halo works by adding LED strips to the back of the monitor. I like Asus but they have a way of not updating their software, and when they do it will usually only work on the newer hardware. I don't trust them to improve the software or even fix it if potentially a windows update breaks it. The RGB light will be harsh with no diffuser or dedicated white leds. NZXT Hue 2 V2 Ambient, they seem a bit more invested in the tech with a v2 released recently, but again this is all controlled with their CAM software which has a terrible reputation. The same RGB strips are used with no diffuser or dedicated white lights. Since these light strips are addressable they offer a higher resolution as only some leds can be triggered to onscreen events, but this to me just seem to make them even harsher on the eye. In both cases the competitions software and features are lacking as compared to the Philips implementation. The lighting is also harsh, which is why I decided to go with Philips hue sync. With philips you can also add lighting at a later point and you are free to place the lights where you want. The lighting should add to the ambience of a gaming session, not be a distraction. UPDATE: Some months have passed since my last review and thought this detailed review could do with an update. In my living room setup I have added another light bar to my rear top left on a bookcase behind a nice Alien statue, and a E27 colour ambiance bulb to my tall lamp on the rear right. This is now my primary way of lighting the living room. I also stuck a Hue dimmer switch close to the couch so we can control brightness easily. Gaming and movies is awesome, although Netflix still does not work with Hue play. Works best with movies that have lots of colour and action. My gaming setup also got another Hue play bar for a total of 4, and a dimmer switch. I missed some light under my shelf and that has now been remedied. My lights are set to switch on via a timer on weekdays to help me get up, and they also switch of automatically when I leave the house. It is not a cheap echo system, but I would miss the ambient light during gaming if you took it away right now. During the past few months there has been one update to the sync app, validating my theory that the ecosystem is larger than the competition, and Philips is actively developing for it.

Bought these couple years ago and they get used daily behind the living room tv. Fantastic product