A few months back, I was looking for a way to update my living room without replacing my TV entirely — something I’m hoping to do probably around Black Friday / Cyber Monday. What I found instead was Govee’s TV backlight set, which uses a small, mountable camera to read the colors on your TV and extend the lights past the screen itself. It’s an added bit of luxury ambience that I adore, and right now through Sept. 7, you can get a full Govee Dreamview TV backlight and light bar kit from Best Buy for just $89.99 (was $139.99). That’s less than I paid for my own setup, and I’ve been very happy with it.
For those who are new to TV backlights, here’s how this one works: a small camera is placed atop your TV, which you can calibrate via the Govee app to make sure it can properly see the quadrants of your TV set from a comfortingly limited viewing angle. That view syncs with strips of backlight attached via adhesive on or near the back of your TV, as well as two light bars that can be placed nearby. From there, you can set the lights to match what’s on screen and “extend” the adjacent colors. In an ideal world, the view looks like it does it does here (from The Verge’s excellent review of a similar Govee backlight set from 2021):
I’ll admit, my own personal setup here has never looked this good — the colors don’t always align as neatly, and watching particularly dark scenes sometimes causes my docked Nintendo Switch to get picked up by the camera via the screen’s reflection, which in turn can cause the bottom row of backlights to glow the same color as my Joy-Cons. I think of this as a funny feature rather than a bug, but it’s worth calling out.
But, despite the little oddities and imperfections in my own experience, there’s a lovely set-it-and-forget-it quality about having something that makes the picture feel larger than it actually is, or at least pop more against the wall. Yes, it’s a bit of a gimmick, but it’s also a gimmick that has made my 55-inch TV feel much bigger than it actually is (my colleague Cameron Faulkner feels the same way). And for less than $90, it’s an easy upgrade, one that I suspect I’ll continue to use no matter what TV I buy next.
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