I Knew TV Backlighting Was Cool. I Didn't Expect It to Be Such a Powerful Upgrade.

A smart TV with orange and blue backlighting.

The isolation of the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 shoulder-checked lots of people into new and unexpected hobbies (Dutch oven bread baking, anyone?). The particular locker that the pandemic stuffed me inside was color-changing lighting. My tumble led me down the Philips Hue smart-lighting hole. It began with light bars and expanded into light strips, and within a couple of years most of the light bulbs in my home were connected to Wi-Fi.

It became a real problem, though, once I realized that my ambient-lighting fixations could converge with my home theater obsession. And that’s when I bought my first active TV backlight kit.

Active TV backlighting sounds patently absurd: You attach a strip of colored LEDs to the back of your television to blast the wall behind it with colored lighting synced to whatever it is you’re watching.

On paper, it’s a classic solution in search of a problem. In practice, though, I’ve found that it’s one of the coolest, most immersive things you can add to your movie-watching or video-game-playing experience.



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