We’ve all done it, spent long hours at night working on a project on our computers. If you are working at night with no other lights on besides the light on your monitor your eyes can easily become strained.
There have been many tests and studies that have confirmed this. There have also been studies on illumination around a display and they have concluded that back illumination of a display causes less eye strain and eye fatigue. I don’t know that many displays that offer this feature, so SoundScience has come up with a simple fix, the Halo 6 LED Lighting Kit. Let’s take a look at see what it’s all about.
Antec’s Halo 6 bias lighting kit promises to reduce eye strain and increase contrast simply by placing some LEDs on the backside of your monitor. The unit consists of a string containing six high-intensity LED lights all attached to a USB port.
Installing the unit is as simple as plugging it into a USB port and attaching the LED string to the back of your monitor via the string’s adhesive strip. The LEDs are very bright and can work as accent lights, if needed, in other applications. For a cheap price, you get six lights on a USB port – pretty nifty. Unfortunately, using the bias lighting kit also uses up a full USB port which can be tough on PCs who’s ports are in short supply.
Also, the LED string is meant for use on a single monitor of up to 24-inches in dimension. If you have a two or three monitor setup, you will need additional strings and, therefore, will use up even more USB ports.
Installation of the actual lights could not be simpler–simply remove the adhesive strip from the back of the lights, apply on the back of the television horizontally where you would like, preferably in the middle of the set. Make sure to be careful when installing as this is a one and done installation, so you will not want to be removing and re-adjusting the lights once applied.
Then, there’s a top layer plastic meant to protect the lights which is also easily removed once installed. Finally you just need to route and connect the USB cable to get power to the lights.
The build quality of the kit is quite good. The strip is flexible enough to fit over any shape and the connection between the USB cable and strip feels very rugged. However, there are a few tweaks that could be made. The first is the length of the power cable, which I found to be too short.
Based on the specifications of the USB interface, the cable should be no more than 3 meters long for a high speed device and 5 meters for low speed – but that’s for transferring data. Seeing how this connection only provides power to the LEDs I don’t see why Antec chose to go with a cable that’s just over 1 meter.
Even with my system sitting next to a very small desk, the cable was just long enough so folks who have a less-than-ideal setup might run into problems. The adhesive is another cause for concern. I’m not sure if this could be improved upon since I’m sure Antec didn’t want to make the strip a permanent add-on, but I found that it was too weak.
Simply the weight of the power cable itself caused that end to peel away. If the adhesive cannot be changed then maybe the power cable should connect at the midway point instead of on the end so that the adhesive on both sides of the strip is supporting the weight evenly.
The efficacy of the bias lighting kit is subject to debate, of course, without some highly-expensive equipment. There is really no technical way to measure levels of eye strain aside from subjective opinion.
The LED strip emits a lot of light on the wall or surface behind the monitor it is attached to and, in doing so, does seem to help with eye fatigue. The light can be so bright, however, that the unit acts as a room light, raising the question: Why not just play with the lights on?
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