I can haz a new toy.
This my friends is something I've been looking at for a while. Hell, I even started learning basics of electronics to try and DIY this...well,
Lightpack kinda made that unnecessary.
"What is it", you might ask, simple my dear Watson. It's is a Ambient Lighting system.
Ambient Lighting system? Jip. What this does is detect the colours at the edges of your screen and then projects these colours onto the wall with very bright RGB LED's (I've set mine to 25 ms between updates), essentially extending your screens effective display area(well...not completely, more of a colour bleed). This reduces the sudden change in contrast between the screen and, well, everything else behind it. This in turn makes it less straining on your eyes to work/play on the screen. Not only that but it makes things feel more "immersive" and just looks bloody cool.
Now that class session is done, lets get to the juicy part...THE UN-BOXING!!!
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| Package all the way from China. (had to wait for a month for this, because my country's postal services are currently having a fun little strike) |
All neatly packed, with some writing on the back of the box (In 5 languages, English, German, Spanish, Chinese and Russian)
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| The black box opens up from the center revealing all the components and an user manual. Parts include: Base station, 10 led light strip wire thingies, USB connector cable, power brick with 3 interchangeable prongs(so this should work no matter which country you live in) some organizing things + cable ties and extra double sided tape. |
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| User manual, "Quick" Install guide |
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| Ooooh, pretty diagrams |
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| Pretty much the only reason why I bothered to look at the manual...I mean, just look at that thing o_O |
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| The LED Wire/Strip thingy. It's quite long, so this SHOULD work for most screen sizes. |
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| Stuck everything to the back of my 21' (laying everything out just like the manual said). |
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| The "Cleanup" block I was talking about |
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| Nice and "organized" |
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| Once done you can't even see that it has this thing attached to it. |
So after I downloaded, installed and ran the setup or the driver/program, I gave it a go.
I tested it with video and games, and worked pretty well with both.
Note, if you are planning to play games with this make sure your run it in border-less mode, full screen doesn't seem to work, also know that the higher you put up the refresh rate the more of a performance knock you'll experience (as it does a screen grab every set amount of ms).
A test on my system (a video, mirrors edge and bf4).
Sorry about a) no sound, only had headphone so phone couldn't hear it b) Image quality and stability...it's hard to play and record a video with your phone c)me being bad at Mirrors Edge
Interestingly enough, the Lightpack system can run tandem with more than one...so I you are fortunate enough to have a monster sized screen , you can do something like the following (using 2 Lightpack's)
All in all, I'm very pleased with this purchase. I think it's bloody awesome...probably my best bought item 2014
More details about the
Lightpack can be found on their website:
http://lightpack.tv/
Any question, suggestions or general smack talk is always welcome.
