Nanoleaf 4D Kit review - an RGB upgrade for your TV/monitor

Our Verdict

The Nanoleaf 4D Kit is an easy, low-cost way to add a rear RGB lighting effect to your TV or monitor. For as low as $100, you can get a Philips Ambilight-style effect that we found reduced eyestrain and really enhanced our TV watching experience, especially for movie night with the lights otherwise turned off. The kit is a bit big and cumbersome for use on most monitors, though. We'd only consider using it with 32-inch or larger screens.

Reasons to buy

• Reduces eye strain
• Enhances immersion in video/games
• Fairly easy setup
• Ideal setup for large TVs

Reasons to avoid

• App can be slow/glitchy
• Requires camera to view TV/monitor
• Too large/cumbersome for most monitors

We’ve long been fans of Philips’ Ambilight technology that fills the space behind your TV or monitor with screen-matching LED lighting. In our experience it can really boost your immersion in what you’re watching while also reducing eyestrain. The Nanoleaf 4D Kit (Nanoleaf 4D Screen Mirror + Light Strip Kit) aims to provide that same functionality but for any screen and for a surprisingly low price.

Its this screen-mirroring tech that is why we think this Nanoleaf kit is one of the best LED light strips you can buy, as it not only adds some fun to your AV or gaming setup but some functionality too.

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Specs

Features and setup

The Nanoleaf 4D Kit consists of three main parts, which are the light strip itself, the control unit/plug interface, and the camera module. There’s also a mains to 12V power supply and some corner mounting pieces.

The strip is available in either 4m (13ft) or 5.2m (17ft) lengths designed for use with 65-inch or 85-inch TVs, which gives you a clue as to the size of gaming monitor that is a sensible match for this kit. I used the kit on a 50-inch TV and there was nearly half the strip length left over.

You can cut the strips down, though, with each 14-inch/36cm length including a cut-off point in the circuitry where it’s safe to just snip through the strip with scissors. The remaining strip isn’t useful for anything else as it stands, though if you’re happy to get a soldering iron out, you could wire it back on to another strip.

Setting up the kit is simple enough, with the strip just sticking to the back of your TV or monitor via its sticky backing – just peel and stick. You will almost certainly, though, need to first afix the corner support pieces. These provide a mount for the strip that lets it gently turn a corner without kinking. The corners also just stick on using provided double-sided foam tape.

The standard strip configuration is to have it either start in the bottom right or left corner, rise up and round the back of the panel and end in the opposite bottom corner, so the strip runs in an ‘n’ shape. Or you can run the strip all the way round to start and end in the same corner. Our setup was limited by the chunky homemade woodern TV stand of my TV, so it only ran in an ‘n’ shape.

Next, you need to hook up the strip to the control unit, which houses the power supply input (a standard 12V barrel connection), the light strip connection, and a port for the camera. On top of this unit there’s also four buttons. One is for power while the other three set the kit to work in screen-mirroring, music-matching, or a fixed pattern/scene mode. The control module also comes with a piece of double-sided tape to stick it to the back of your setup.

As to the camera, this sits on a pole that can either be mounted on a flat surface looking up at the TV or rests on the top edge of your TV like a webcam (it sat quite securely on a number of TVs and monitors I tried). The camera points towards the TV screen and literally sees what’s happening onscreen so it can match the lighting to it. This is in contrast to how the Govee AI Sync Box works, as that sits in-between your PC/console cables and your screen and pulls the image data directly from the video signal.

Once everything’s connected up, you have to download the Nanoleaf app and scan the QR code on the underside of the control unit. Once in the app, among the key setup steps is calibrating the camera, with the app showing a live view of the camera with a moveable white outline overlay. You can grab the edges of this outline and move them to match exactly the outer edges of your display’s screen, so the app knows exactly which parts of the image with which to try and match its lighting.

Initially, I found the setup procedure quite easy but then the first couple of times of attempting the process, either the setup process bugged out on me or, once setup, the whole unit didn’t seem to be stable, regularly just not responding to my commands. It took an app update and (iirc) a firmware update to the unit via the app to get it to all work stably, which it has done ever since.

These headaches aside, the app is fairly intuitive to use and offers loads of customisation options. You can set the strip to be a static color, follow audio cues, show all manner of multi-color patterns, or have it screen-mirror.

The mirroring itself can also be set to 1D, 2D, 3D, or the titular 4D. 1D doesn’t have anything to do with Harry Styles (well he did leave) but instead has the light strip show plain white but with the brightness matching the brightness of the scene on screen. 2D ups this to showing the dominant color of the scene across the whole strip while 3D goes a step further, adding multiple colors from the scene. 4D has the strip do its utmost to accurately match all the strip’s LEDs to match exactly the colors on screen.

Design and performance

Before we move onto talking about how well the Nanoleaf 4D Kit actually works, it’s worth a word on the elephant in the room as regards its physical setup. Yes, I’m talking about that camera. There’s no getting round the fact that having a camera on a stalk above your TV looks a bit weird. It’s perhaps less of an issue on a monitor – where you’re likely used to having a webcam – but it’s definitely not ideal.

Likewise, the control box and the need for the strip lighting, power cable and camera cable all makes for a fair amount of stuff to deal with. It’s a great workaround to provide the same functionality as the likes of an  Ambilight TV, but there’s a definite compromise in terms of style, particularly if the back of your TV/monitor is visible.

That leads us on to one of the obvious performance points about this kit, which is that it does rely on you having a wall or other flat surface behind your screen that’s also somewhat lightly colored. That may seem obvious but if your wall is too far away, is entirely gloomy, very brightly-colored, or too glossy, the overall “gentle wash of color” effect is nowhere near as affective.

With the right setup, though, I absolutely was won over by this kit. It brought a new lease of life to my old 50-inch plasma TV, and would no doubt be even better on a larger TV with a much thinner bezel. The way the lighting feels like it naturally extends out, as though what’s onscreen is happening just behind the bezels – almost like the TV’s just the in-focus part of the view – is really absorbing.

It’s especially compelling when you sit down to watch a movie with the lights otherwise off. Not only does it help draw you in just a little more but the extra lighting (scene dependent) even helps you see your popcorn more easily.

I also found the lighting slightly eased my eyestrain. I generally like to have some background light when watching TV, just to balance out the brightness levels a bit, but here the kit naturally provides this, dynamically adjusting the required brightness in accordance with the scene.

The brightness can be truly dazzling too but can also be tailed back. I settled on about 75% brightness as the dark blue blinds behind the TV dulled the effect somewhat. 50% is probably more than enough against a white wall.

Something to watch out for are the default modes. The Cinematic mode is just too dim while the Vivid mode is too bright with too wide a dynamic range (the bright bits are too bright and the dark bits are too dark). Instead, you’re better off opting for the Custom mode and setting dynamic range to about 50/100, Saturation to a similar level, and the White Balance to around 5600K.

With these settings, you can get a nice balance of dark scenes, such as the classic Star Wars text scroll from the opening of Ohsoka (above) having just a gentle and atmospheric wash of blue, to the brightness and color tones stepping up to match the much brighter opening scene of the show (below).

The light strip runs fairly warm but not enough to be alarming. Nanoleaf claims the max power consumption of each meter of strip is 7.2W, which means a full length setup of the 5.2m version could draw upwards of 35W at max brightness. That’s a few energy saving bulbs worth of power, so isn’t something you’d want to leave on all the time.

In terms of using the strips on a gaming monitor, we found it all a bit too much in terms of bits to accomodate behind the screen and the length of cable. It only felt remotely like it was worthwhile when using a really large screen, though we certainly would like to see a more compact version designed especially for smaller gaming monitors.

Price

The Nanoleaf 4D kit is priced at either $99.99 for the 4m kit or $119.99 for the 5.2m kit, which isn’t cheap but is a fair price for everything you get. Nanoleaf’s own wall-mount RGB shapes that are designed to just be added to a wall to look cool tend to cost twice this much without including the camera and screen-mirroring bit.

Generic light strips can be found for much less – Nanoleaf’s own Essentials kit is only $50 – but again you lack that all important screen-mirroring feature. Notably, Govee’s direct competitor, the Envisual, costs $139.99, though it is a dual-camera kit and we’ve not tested it for comparison yet.

Final thoughts

While it’s not exactly a cheap, no-brainer upgrade, the Nanoleaf 4D Kit is still a surprisingly affordable way to really enhance your TV viewing experience, if your display doesn’t otherwise have screen-mirroring tech. Its setup is fairly easy and the results are fantastic. The installation does somewhat inherently mean you can’t easily move the kit from one screen to another, if you ever need or want to upgrade your display, but it’s technically doable and still feels fair in terms of price.

Not everyone will see the value in what this kit does – and it’s suitability to gaming monitors is a little limited, due to the bulk and strip length of the kit compared to a typical gaming monitor – but if you’ve ever seen or been tempted by the Ambilight-style screen-mirroring lighting, this kit is easy to recommend.

Alternatives

Govee Envisual

Get the same effect as this kit but from arguably Nanoleaf’s biggest rival, Govee. We’ve not tested the Envisual but its dual-camera setup could be more accurate than the Nanoleaf one, plus its light strips are split into sections that are easier to get round corners and it has 60 LEDs per meter compared to the Nanoleaf’s 30 per meter.