More than a TV-syncing light accessory, the Play Wall Washer can do plenty in the right home.
I recently went down a bright, RGB-laden hole with a mission: to satisfy my curiosity about smart lights that try to rip the colors off your TV and splash them onto the wall behind it. I’ve been skeptical of such TV lights muddying filmmakers’ intent the same way modern TVs with motion smoothing and other AI image processing can. After toying with the Philips Hue Play Wall Washer, I wouldn’t say I’m sold on the idea yet, but the good news is that’s not all this little can full of LED modules can do.
Signify, the company that licenses and makes products under the Philips Hue brand, might mainly advertise the Play Wall Washer as a way to spice up your entertainment system. But it’s equally adept as wall-coating accent lighting or a wake-up light in your bedroom, using the same interface that works for other colorful Hue smart lighting. The Wall Washer itself is a small, upright lamp inside an aluminum enclosure that feels very sturdy. It projects light outward and upward from three rows of LED lights, each working to produce smooth gradients and colors that are rich without being garishly oversaturated, which I’ve always appreciated about the whole Hue smart light line.
It’s a versatile little product, yet I find myself jumping through a lot of mental hoops to justify the Play Wall Washer. At $219.99, it’s not the most expensive RGB light in the usually-spendy Philips Hue lineup, but you would still need to either have or create an ideal space for it in your home to make it worthwhile. And it takes a whole lot more money to make it work as a TV backlight.Expanding your TV’s colors
Signify calls the Play Wall Washer an “immersive surround lighting” experience for your home entertainment center. The smart light’s product page shows two Play Wall Washers standing astride a giant TV, splaying green and blue gradients over a broad, near-featureless white wall.
It takes a hefty investment—$384.99 for a two-pack of the smart lights; another $384.99 for the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K; and $65.99 for a Hue Bridge—to achieve what Philips’ image shows, but it ain’t much easier on your wallet with just one Play Wall Washer. You can skip the Sync Box 8K (or the older $249.99 4K model) if you have one of the recent 2022 or newer Samsung or 2024 LG TVs, for which Signify has a standalone Hue Sync app. But because we can’t have anything nice, you’ll still be on the hook for a $129.99 one-time purchase covering a single TV or a $2.99 monthly subscription that’s good for three TVs. You don’t actually need a Hue Bridge if you’re not doing the TV-syncing thing—you can still use it as a fancy gradient-beaming light via the Hue app over Bluetooth—but you’ll also lose Matter support, limiting your smart home ecosystem options to just Google Home and Amazon Alexa.
I tested a single unit paired with the Sync Box 8K, which has four HDMI 2.1 inputs and one HDMI 2.1 output that can pass up to 4K content at 120Hz (or 8K at 60Hz) through to your TV using an included Ultra High-Speed HDMI cable. You can switch inputs via the Hue app, but I found I never needed to; its automatic input-switching when I turned on another device was flawless. It also supports Dolby Vision and HDR10 video.
Setup in the Hue app is fairly quick and painless, involving a little QR code-scanning and, for the Sync Box, tapping the button on your Hue Bridge and using a little graphic to drag the Play Wall Washer to its approximate location relative to your TV. After setup, controlling TV syncing—which you’ll do from the Sync tab in the app—is pretty straightforward, letting you do things like tweak the brightness of your lights and intensity of their effects.
