Antec, under the Soundscience brand, has put out a HALO 6-LED bias lighting system, although, system is a bit of an exaggeration. Basically, it’s a strip of, yep, you guessed it, six LEDs, for the back of your monitor. The idea is that it is supposed to reduce eye strain when gaming in the dark. The problem is, I’ve never experienced any eye strain while gaming in the dark so reviewing the product was sort of difficult.
Luckily, the product itself offered me a plethora of things to talk about.
Why Bias Lighting?
Bias lighting is not like the ambient lighting that has been around for some time, which takes on the major colors of the picture and helps to expand the viewing experience (though at the core it is similar). What this is, is some white backlighting for your monitor or TV in order to assist the contrast levels and reduce eye strain. However, it’s not always extremely effective. It’s mostly to assist when the picture is extremely bright and can’t be properly adjusted.
It’s best used when your TV or display has a poor black level. As I have a brand new LED monitor, that’s not the case here. What it does is help trick your iris into closing somewhat so that those bright blacks (where they look luminous and gray) look more like black. If you’ve got a display with poor contrast, this might work wonders for you. So, if you’ve got an older LCD or even a (*gasp*) CRT monitor, this could really do some wonders for you and not require you to buy a whole new display to get a slightly better image. Then again, if you’ve got a CRT (that’s the old tube monitors FYI), don’t you think it’s time to upgrade anyway?
The Antec Soundscience Solution
While the brand name might make you think they’re all about sound (and indeed their first product was the Rokus speaker system), it seems they’re also branching out into light. The HALO 6-LED bias lighting systems is a flexible, USB-powered strip of lights that adheres to the back of your monitor and is pretty much always on while plugged in. That instantly brings me to the first shortcoming of the device. There’s no off switch. So that means, if you don’t want to use it, or you’re in a bright environment, like the office, you would have to reach and unplug it from the USB port and then when you wanted to use it, again, reach and plug it in.
Considering that it’s made to be mounted to the back of the display, you’d probably plug it into the back of the computer and then would have to fumble around to get it unplugged and plugged in. Not something I’m interested in doing on a regular basis.
