An amazing idea but now desperate for an update
3/5
I’ve been using Philips Hue lighting products for several years and generally find them to be expensive but good at what they do (Apple anyone?)
After waiting more than a year for the heavily anticipated release of an updated Hue Play Sync Box with true 4k 120Hz capability, I couldn’t wait any longer after finally updating my main TV and took the plunge on the (still) only product on the market.
It comes well packaged, and looks and feels well made from good materials.
From prior experience I knew Hue setup could be tricky. This was no different. As the product is quite a few years old, the relevant product pages and info can be contradictory in places and the Hue app contains dead links to help pages that have either been moved or deleted.
There were issues connecting to my Hue Bridge which took longer than they should to resolve.
The dedicated app has been removed from the IOS App Store, and is now catered for in the main Hue app. The setup process wasn’t especially intuitive and navigating the settings menu to find the necessary menu items to tweak the various settings was a magical mystery tour.
I eventually managed to set the thing up at a basic level with a gradient light bar underneath and a gradient light strip around the new TV.
Generally, it performs well and the novelty of reactive lighting is enjoyable. Exploring the various streaming channels and media sources on my Fire Stick 4k Max revealed some issues.
Disney+ with Dolby Vision does not appear to work with this product. I spent hours searching the web for answers but found nothing to help, although multiple other people have the same issue with another streaming product.
Therein lies the biggest problem with this product: Philips have declined to update it to match the capabilities of recent (years not months) AV products. Proper 4k 120Hz being the obvious issue. Getting this to make full use of recent TVs is literally impossible at a hardware level, most especially for game systems such as PS5, which aren’t exactly new!
Despite multiple tweaks and resets I still don’t have synced / any lighting with Disney+ Dolby Vision movies… think the Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar franchises, Avatar etc. All of which would be ideal candidates to benefit from working lighting.
It’s not cheap, and was no doubt awesome at the time of the release but has now fallen behind what’s needed to keep up with recent tech.
It appears that Philips are more focussed on transferring some of the functionality into onboard apps for TVs rather than an updated piece of hardware. That would be all well and good if only they hadn’t so far restricted the app to Samsung TVs!
I can’t recommend this item at this price range unless you know for certain that you are never going above 4k at 60Hz (and don’t want Dolby Vision from Disney+).
King of the Fixers
