A Spendy TV Glow-Up for Movie Night at Home

I recently went down a bright, RGB-laden hole with a mission: to satisfy my curiosity about smart lights that try to rip the colors off your TV and splash them onto the wall behind it. I’ve been skeptical of such TV lights muddying filmmakers’ intent the same way modern TVs with motion smoothing and other AI image processing can. After toying with the Philips Hue Play Wall Washer, I wouldn’t say I’m sold on the idea yet, but the good news is that’s not all this little can full of LED modules can do.

Signify, the company that licenses and makes products under the Philips Hue brand, might mainly advertise the Play Wall Washer as a way to spice up your entertainment system. But it’s equally adept as wall-coating accent lighting or a wake-up light in your bedroom, using the same interface that works for other colorful Hue smart lighting. The Wall Washer itself is a small, upright lamp inside an aluminum enclosure that feels very sturdy. It projects light outward and upward from three rows of LED lights, each working to produce smooth gradients and colors that are rich without being garishly oversaturated, which I’ve always appreciated about the whole Hue smart light line.

It’s a versatile little product, yet I find myself jumping through a lot of mental hoops to justify the Play Wall Washer. At $219.99, it’s not the most expensive RGB light in the usually-spendy Philips Hue lineup, but you would still need to either have or create an ideal space for it in your home to make it worthwhile. And it takes a whole lot more money to make it work as a TV backlight.

Expanding your TV’s colors

Signify calls the Play Wall Washer an “immersive surround lighting” experience for your home entertainment center. The smart light’s product page shows two Play Wall Washers standing astride a giant TV, splaying green and blue gradients over a broad, near-featureless white wall.

See Philips Hue Play Wall Washer at Amazon

It takes a hefty investment—$384.99 for a two-pack of the smart lights; another $384.99 for the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K; and $65.99 for a Hue Bridge—to achieve what Philips’ image shows, but it ain’t much easier on your wallet with just one Play Wall Washer. You can skip the Sync Box 8K (or the older $249.99 4K model) if you have one of the recent 2022 or newer Samsung or 2024 LG TVs, for which Signify has a standalone Hue Sync app. But because we can’t have anything nice, you’ll still be on the hook for a $129.99 one-time purchase covering a single TV or a $2.99 monthly subscription that’s good for three TVs. You don’t actually need a Hue Bridge if you’re not doing the TV-syncing thing—you can still use it as a fancy gradient-beaming light via the Hue app over Bluetooth—but you’ll also lose Matter support, limiting your smart home ecosystem options to just Google Home and Amazon Alexa.

I tested a single unit paired with the Sync Box 8K, which has four HDMI 2.1 inputs and one HDMI 2.1 output that can pass up to 4K content at 120Hz (or 8K at 60Hz) through to your TV using an included Ultra High-Speed HDMI cable. You can switch inputs via the Hue app, but I found I never needed to; its automatic input-switching when I turned on another device was flawless. It also supports Dolby Vision and HDR10 video.

Setup in the Hue app is fairly quick and painless, involving a little QR code-scanning and, for the Sync Box, tapping the button on your Hue Bridge and using a little graphic to drag the Play Wall Washer to its approximate location relative to your TV. After setup, controlling TV syncing—which you’ll do from the Sync tab in the app—is pretty straightforward, letting you do things like tweak the brightness of your lights and intensity of their effects.

The main advantage the Play Wall Washer has over covering the back of your TV with RGB integrated circuit (RGBIC) light strips—the kind with LED modules that can be controlled individually, making color gradients along the strip possible—is that physically setting it up is a breeze. You just plop it down behind your TV, plug it and the Sync Box into the wall, hook up your HDMI cables to the Sync Box, and you’re done. The disadvantage is that it being a single light source meansit’ll cast harsh shadows if there’s anything mounted on the wall above it. LED strips don’t really have that issue.

Once I cleared out some shadow-casting objects, the Sync Box and Play Wall Washer struck me as being good if what you’re after is more of a vibe than seeing colors bleed out from the edge of your TV, or perhaps bias lighting, which can make watching a screen easier on your eyes. Yes, it flashed its lights right alongside the lightning in the opening sequence of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalkerwhen Kylo Ren first visits Exegol, and bloomed red and orange in the sunset sequence of The Incrediblesas Mrs. Incredible races to save a commuter bullet train from certain doom. But the light wasn’t as precisely positioned around my TV as that you’d get from an LED strip slapped on the back of your TV.

It seemed a bit more precise when I slipped it into gaming mode and played Donkey Kong Bananza on my Nintendo Switch 2, but the effect was still muted. Even so, this left me a lot more convinced by the whole TV backlight concept, at least for gaming—I’d even say I enjoyed the spectacle. Movies are presented as a piece of art meant to wash over you, but video games are inherently participatory—how you experience their stories is up to you, and for me at least, a synchronized light show feels more additive than distracting.

So, price and precision are the Play Wall Washer’s big weak points. I A/B tested it against the $149.99 Govee TV Backlight 3 Lite Kit (see the GIFs above), which uses an LED strip and two light bars, and the even cheaper $94.49 HDMI Sync Box from Wiz, another Signify brand—both produced much more localized lighting and aren’t just cheaper than the Play Wall Washer on their own, and neither requires you to buy anything else to sync with your TV. Their colors are a lot more in-your-face than the Play Wall Washers, which is a good thing for some people, and if you don’t like it, there are ways to tone things down in their respective apps.

They each have their own drawbacks, though: Govee’s kit requires hanging an ugly camera from the top of your TV to capture color information, and the lights lag behind the picture slightly (for what it’s worth, the company does sell a Sync Box with specs similar to the Philips Hue Sync Box 8K), and the Wiz Sync Box only has a single HDMI input and is limited to 4K resolution at 60Hz or 1440p at 120Hz. And sticking an LED strip to the back of your TV is a pain in both cases.

See Philips Hue Play Wall Washer at Amazon

Great for decoration if your house was designed by Apple

But maybe you’re only interested in the Play Wall Washer as a decorative item. Good for you; you’ll save a little money, and the Play Wall Washer’s ability to bathe a broad surface in colorful light is excellent. The sweet spot, to me, started at about a foot from a wall, letting me coat the it all the way up to the ceiling. You can go with static lights or gradients—the Hue app has a ton of nice pre-made ones, but you can also roll your own with a color picker in the app—or you can choose from several effects like those that other colorful Hue bulbs and lightstrips use. My favorite was Cosmic Gold, which alternately undulates light in front of and above the lamp, blasts color everywhere, and quickly dials the brightness all the way down in a fluid, repeating animation.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find somewhere to actually put it. It’s meant to be stood on a hard surface—either your floor or a table—and with the light pointing upward, everything ends up being underlit, casting harsh shadows if the light encounters any texture or decorations, making it hard for me to find a wall it would work on. Its power cord is a generous 6.2-feet long, but it’s embedded, rather than using something like USB-C, so you need a bulky extension cord if it doesn’t reach. Also, there are no mounting screw holes, so you’d have to get creative if you want to put it anywhere other than the floor or a piece of furniture.

The only hope for it in my house was my bedroom, which is a converted attic with walls that are only briefly vertical before angling to follow the roofline. The light covered the entire 15-foot length of the wall with vibrant, smooth gradients, and the angled wall helped with furniture shadows and kept the light from fading as it climbed higher. But the Play Wall Washer was smack in the middle of my bedroom floor, right in the walkway and ready to trip me. Ultimately, if you don’t have tons of space and an Apple-like minimalist sensibility, it’s hard to see this smart light being practical for decoration outside of something like an art gallery.

Smart home compatibility Matters

If you have a Hue Bridge to connect it to, the Play Wall Washer gets support for Matter, the universal protocol that lets your device work across any of the major smart home platforms. That approach—using a hub instead of giving the light Matter compatibility on its own—means I didn’t have to do anything after setup to get it working in Apple Home, Google Home, my Flic Hub, and Amazon Alexa; it was just already there. Without a Hue Bridge, it’ll only work with the last two in that list. That could be fine in the short term, but if some slick new platform emerges down the road, there’s far less chance this light will be supported without Matter.

Whatever your platform of choice is, you’ll still want to use the Hue app, as it’s the only way to make the Play Wall Washer show gradients. It’s also where you’ll find Hue’s various automations, like presence-mimicking that can randomly turn your lights on and off at night when you’re away, or geofencing that toggles them off or on when you leave or come home. The Play Wall Washer is actually really nice with the Hue wake-up automation, which turns it slowly over a long stretch, because it can be both extremely dim and very bright. That long wall I mentioned earlier? It was nice to close my curtains and wake up to it totally bathed in the colors of a sunrise.

The Philips Hue tax

The $219.99 Hue Play Wall Washer is a really cool little smart lamp that’s small enough that it won’t call attention to itself beyond the lush colors it produces. It’s not cheap, but for home decor purposes, the price may be right, so long as you have a big ol’ wall to shine its light onto and the space to keep it from being underfoot.

As a TV-syncing light, it might be too subdued and imprecise for many people, and it’s limited to TVs that are placed a little away from the wall if you want even lighting from a single Play Wall Washer. But even if you do like its vibe and super easy setup, the costs ramp way up to unlock that functionality, requiring you to buy hardware that costs much more than the light itself or have one of very few specific TV sets that can do it for you, assuming you already have a Hue Bridge. Given that the market is absolutely lousy with TV backlight options, it may be best to save your money and skip the Hue Play Wall Washer.

See Philips Hue Play Wall Washer at Amazon