If you don’t have a proper Philips Ambilight TV but want to enjoy the same mood lighting experience that it’s known for, you can get that. But the problem with the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K, which is necessary to enable that experience, is that it’s pretty expensive, priced at £250 on Amazon right now.
Which is why it’s nice to see that the U.K. retailer Very is dramatically undercutting that price with its sibling mood light synchronising platform, which is called the Philips Hue Play Sync Box Lite. It has been listed at the substantially cheaper price of just £109.99, and it offers more or less the same functionality, with just a couple of trade-offs.
Both products carry the Philips brand, but it’s not clear if the actual manufacturer is the same. Philips has a habit of licensing its brand name to all kinds of companies, you see. But in any case, what’s important is whether or not it works, and it appears that the Philips Hue Play Sync Box Lite does the job it says it can.
Just like the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K, the cheaper model is designed to synchronise the brightness and colour of the Philips Hue lights that you also need to purchase and stick around the sides of your TV display. What it does is it matches the mood lighting effects to the content on your TV screen. So if the TV is showing a sunset over a blue ocean, the lights at the bottom of the screen will automatically glow blue like the sea, while the lights at the top will radiate red and orange hues to match the sun.
According to the listing on Very, the Philips Hue Play Sync Box Lite supports 4K resolution, which is a step down from the 8K of the more expensive HDMI Sync Box. Nonetheless, that shouldn’t really matter to most people given how incredibly uncommon 8K televisions still are. On the other hand, the Philips Hue Play Sync Box Lite only has a single HDMI port, whereas the 8K version has four of them. This means that if you want to have mood lighting on more than one device, you’ll have to keep switching the cable around. That’s the price you pay for paying a lower price, it seems.
Another trade-off is that the Philips Hue Play Sync Box Lite only supports 4K at a maximum of 60Hz, which means it won’t work for console gamers hoping to play games at 4K/120Hz. Instead, they’ll have to make do with 4K/60Hz, or else switch to 1080p at 120Hz.
Nonetheless, if you’re in the market for an Ambilight experience and money is tight, and you’re willing to make those trade-offs, the Philips Hue Play Sync Box Lite is likely to be a tempting option.
The device is currently listed as being “out of stock,” but Very has a habit of listing products just a few days ahead of their launch, so when it actually does so, expect it to suddenly have a very large supply that’s ready to ship.
