I’m a sucker for smart lighting. From LIFX’s color-changing light bulbs to installing swoon-worthy LED backlights in both my living room and home office, I’ve learned firsthand the power of great lighting to level up your home decor. Weirdly enough, it’s one of the only ways I’ve stepped into the world of smart home devices — I’m not a huge fan of many home assistants or randomly WiFi-enabled gadgets — but smart lighting sold me early. It’s convenient, vibe-worthy, and one of the easiest ways to upgrade a room, which is why I jumped at the chance to try Govee Envisual TV Backlight T2(Opens in a new tab) for myself.
What is the Govee TV Backlight T2?
There are plenty of backlight options available on the market today. From LED light bars to color-changing LED lightstrips, most of them involve using a companion app on your phone to change the color of the light to suit your mood. Govee’s Envisual TV Backlight T2 takes this up a notch, and it combines easy-to-install LED lightstrips with a simple, dual-camera system to provide synchronized color lighting that instantly levels up your home theater experience. Govee uses high-density RGBIC technology — with 60 LEDs per meter — meaning you get smoother, more precise color that integrates with its upgraded Envisual color-matching technology.
While all of that sounds complicated, the way it works is pretty simple. After adhering the LED lightstrips to the back of your television, you simply place the weighted camera on the top of your TV where it can “see” your screen and voila — the product syncs your television screen with the backlighting to provide a truly immersive lighting experience.
Installation was easy, but the calibration process took a few tries
I was worried that the installation process for the T2 would be painful, but I was surprised by how easy it was. After removing our TV from the wall mount, we cleaned off the back of the television — thankfully Govee included alcohol wipes to make this easier — then laid out the four conjoined LED strips along the back edges.
Once we knew where everything fit, including the small control box, it was just a matter of peeling off the adhesive and securing the light strips with the additional clips. From there, we connected the light strips and the camera to the control box, plugged the control box into our power strip, and moved onto calibration
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After downloading the Govee companion app and connecting the T2 to my WiFi network, the calibration process — ensuring the camera can see your screen correctly and translate the colors to the backlights — was a little clunky. First, you attach seven orange foam squares to all four corners of your television screen, as well as the center of each side, then you follow the in-app instructions to begin the process. The app shows you a view of your television screen, and you drag the blue dots to match with the orange squares.
It all sounds pretty simple, but it took several rounds of calibration to get everything to work correctly. First, the glare on our TV screen from the lights in our bedroom interfered with the process, but when we turned them off it was difficult to see the orange squares during calibration. We finally got to a point where everything felt “good enough,” and it was time to put the lights to the test.
The Govee app is a little overwhelming
Once your lights are set up and calibrated, you have a ton of options for use. There are four main modes available — music, video, color, and scene — as well as a DIY option for users who want to create their own lighting effects within the app. We started with video mode, which changes the backlight colors to match any video/image on the screen. After fiddling with the saturation and brightness, we popped on a colorful animated YouTube video and were immediately stunned by the results.
These lights are bright, and the color sync is beyond impressive. If you have everything calibrated correctly, the backlighting adjusts to match all sides of the screen, and you can modify the brightness for a subtle or bold effect, depending on your preference. The lights themselves were a bit glitchy when we used the “game” option in video mode, but switching it over to “all” smoothed everything out and provided a much more enjoyable experience.