Bias lighting is certainly a benefit for the bottom line of the companies selling overpriced strings of christmas lights to stick on the back of your monitor…the benefit over just having a reasonably diffuse light in the same room and turning down the contrast is less clear.
[Bias lighting] works because it provides enough ambient light in the viewing area that your pupils don’t have to dilate as far. This makes for less eyestrain when a flashbang gets thrown your way or a bolt of lightning streams across the screen," he told Ars. "Because the display is no longer the only object emitting light in the room, colors and black levels appear richer than they would in a totally black environment. Bias lighting is key in maintaining a reference quality picture and reducing eye-strain.
Although I guess your point is that any light in the room is sufficient – but the light needs to be in your field of view aka “the viewing area”, near what you’re looking at.
If bias lighting is so effective, why don’t movie theaters use it?
I have ambi lighting (is that the same as bias lighting? I don’t know…) on my tv, and I love it because it emphasizes and extends the colors that are already visible on the screen, without distracting in any way because you are seeing those colors anyway. With color changing speakers this would not be the case: it’s just random colors, unrelated to anything else you see and therefore probably different from/contrasting with what you see on screen. I’d hate that: very distracting.
Perhaps it could work when just listening to music, without watching a pc screen. But I doubt it.
Rules might be different for a projector versus a LED / OLED screen which generates its own light. I found this:
Bias lighting is used with direct-view type displays because of their elevated light output. Such displays are designed to compete with high ambient lighting and seldom operate correctly when lowered in light output to emulate front projection systems. TVs and monitors are generally recommended to be calibrated for 30 to 35 fL of peak white output in a predominantly dark room (SMPTE and other standards organizations recommend bias lighting be used in such a scenario). Commercial cinemas and residential front projection systems generally are recommended to be calibrated for 12 to 16 fL (total darkness is recommended as ideal for such systems). That’s quite a difference in screen brightness for the human visual system to handle during extended viewing sessions.
Per the webpage for the speakers, the colors aren’t random, but tied to whatever is being displayed on the screen. Not something I’m going to spend $200 on to try personally, but I’m in the ‘could be interesting’ category rather than outright calling it dopey. I do agree random color changes would be useless.
At the moment, it looks like this lighting is Logitech’s answer to Razer Chroma. The blurb implies that it requires the game to support it. So it seems an open question as to whether you’ll get dynamic backlighting for every game. And even if you do, you should remember its a software solution so a performance hit is possible.
Other than that, without reviews its difficult to say what the speakers are like. Supposedly the speakers are based upon
And if that’s the general level of the speakers, you wouldn’t want to pay $200, lights or not.
Ok, that does make a world of difference. Guess I should have viewed the website first, instead of simply assuming the colors would be sound-related, it being speakers and all. My mistake.