Philips has been performing some genuinely spectacular issues over time with its Ambilight TV tech, even going past RGB LEDs and jamming pico projectors into the again of its costly teles to beam out an outlined visible halo. And no person likes a great set of RGB LEDs like a PC gamer, amirite? So thank the maker it’s produced the HUE 2 tech so you’ll be able to DIY your personal gaming monitor to match.
Sorry… my mistake… it’s truly NZXT who’s yoinked Philips’ lighting model identify and created a DIY model of the corporate’s TV tech to strap onto the again of your gaming monitor and make with the immersive pretties. Except it’s solely immersive up to a degree… Still, the HUE 2 RGB Ambient Lighting Kit comes with the whole lot it is advisable make your gaming monitor lit, whether or not your rocking a 21-inch panel, or one which goes all the way in which as much as 35-inches.
And it’s all fairly simple and non-invasive too. There’s no PC surgical procedure required to have your games spilling out from the normal boundaries of your monitor’s bezels, just a few double-sided tape, a bit of RGB controller field, and a fast set up of the NZXT CAM software program. Wait… the CAM software program? Really? I’m out…
Sorry, sure, if you need the complete immersive ambient lighting package to react to no matter is being broadcast in your display then I’m afraid you’re going to should be a card-carrying member of the CAM crew. Well, not essentially ‘card-carrying’ as you may get away with out truly making a profile and logging in as a visitor, however you will have to have the software program booting up with Windows and working round within the background of your PC.
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And as a result of it, like virtually all homebrew PC lighting, is a proprietary factor you’ll nonetheless want the lighting controllers in your case, motherboard, keyboard, mouse, floor, headphone stand, bow tie, and RGB gimp masks. Thankfully I’ve not encountered any conflicts as but with my present Corsair iCUE/Logitech software program combo, but it surely does imply your PC’s boot-time software program bloat will enhance. Even if CAM is just wafer skinny…
But the package is not less than a doddle to arrange. You’ll have to comply with the directions to know which of the numerous addressable RGB strips to place the place, relying on the dimensions and facet ratio of the monitor in query. The controller is a wired dual-channel affair, so that you simply want to stay one L-shaped bundle of LED strips to the highest left nook and one other to the underside proper. Then plug within the energy and USB information cables and also you’re good to go.
The LED strips all have sticky backing to them – which makes them simple to connect to the rear of your panel – and plug straight into each other so you’ll be able to unfold them round no matter dimension of monitor you have got as much as a 35-inch ultrawide show.
The complete set up course of took me barely twenty minutes and all of it lit up as quickly as I began booting up my PC. Once the CAM software program is downloaded and put in you’re then capable of take full management over the lighting, and resolve whether or not you need it to stay fastened or whether or not you wish to go ambient.
The structured lighting results are fairly conventional, permitting you to create results or static glows to gentle up your room, however by way of CAM you’ll be able to change to ambient mode. Though if you happen to’re into twitch gaming we perhaps wouldn’t advocate you go full ambient.
And that’s as a result of as efficient as bleeding your display’s color palette throughout the wall behind the monitor may be, it will get mighty distracting whenever you’re truly taking part in most games. The drawback is there’s a tangible lag to the switching of colors, which implies that in any fast-paced game the display’s going to be displaying one thing else as soon as the HUE 2 lighting system has tried to catch up.
I’ve performed games on the previous Philips AmbiLux set, the TV with the pico projectors within the rear, and that delivers an unimaginable, and super-slick, gaming expertise. It expands your peripheral view past the panel in entrance of you, serving to to actually immerse your self in a manner a restricted, flat picture typically can’t.
The HUE 2, nevertheless, has the other impact to the specified immersion. It pulls you out of the game, making all of it reasonably jarring the place it ought to assist you to nearly neglect in regards to the bezels of your monitor.
Outside of high-speed gaming, although, it does work admirably. Something slower paced – resembling Total War, Civilization, or Football Manager – can ship an efficient ambient expertise, and might do it with little enter from you too. You simply arrange the ambient mode in CAM and nearly irrespective of the place the picture on display is coming from it may possibly unfold the colors out behind your display. But the ‘almost’ there may be the operative phrase.
In my testing not each game appeared able to hooking into the API the HUE 2 tech works from. Dirt Rally wouldn’t play ball, and a few different titles in my library shut the rear-firing LEDs down too. And there are different bugs too – leaving my monitor to enter standby, or just turning the display off whereas the PC stayed on, meant the HUE 2 lights defaulted to white and gained’t change once more till the entire system was rebooted.
And typically it refuses to show off even after the PC and monitor have been shut down, leaving me to yank out the ability cable from the again of the HUE 2 management field lest the LED glow from my mini residence workplace disrupt my or my cats’ sleep.
So it’s a bit buggy, a bit of laggy, and at $110 (£90) it’s a reasonably costly novelty. I’ll admit it has positively lent a sure soothing aesthetic appeal to my Football Manager obsession, but it surely wants turning off after I leap again into Metro Exodus.
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