The Best Smart Light Deals Still Available For Prime Day

Jul 01, 2023

Smart lights have made gaming rooms much more enjoyable places to spend time. Find out what is the best Prime Day deal on smart lighting.

Over the past year, Game Rant has been fortunate enough to test out some the most innovative smart lights from companies like Nanoleaf, Govee, and Philips Hue. Enjoying a boom in popularity, smart lighting now encompasses a broad category of products that include wall panel lights, LED light strips, and smart bulbs. Many of these options are available for all-time low prices on Amazon Prime Day, making it an opportune time to decorate an ordinary looking gaming, media, or living room. Even at their current discounts, it takes a considerable investment to completely renovate a space with smart lighting. To help buyers make their decisions, here are the options I believe they should focus on followed by revealing the best overall smart light to purchase.

Some of these deals are exclusive to Prime members, but don't fret! New members can try Prime for 30 days, free.

The Govee RGBIC LED Neon Rope Lights for Desks is the easiest way yet to add spectacular lighting to gaming desks. Featuring 42 customizable segments, the 84 RGBIC light beads produce a never-ending variety of patterns and colors. The 10-foot neon rope light strip has 12 cutting points allowing users to create a strip from 7 to 10 feet long. Constructed with a soft silicone material, the light strip resists inevitable bumps and bruises near a gaming desk. The neon rope lights are compatible with Google Home, Amazon Alexa, as well as Govee's AI Dreamview Sync, and Razer Synapse software.

The Govee Neon Rope Lights for Desks accomplishes its goal of instantly transforming a boring gaming desk into a distinctive piece of furniture. As a result, this soft and flexible strip of lights were a favorite to hit the market in the past year. Unlike typical LED light strips, these Govee lights are far more practical when shining light in a gamer's face for hours at a time. The bulbs in the Rope Lights are diffused enough to avoid blinding users but remain sufficiently vibrant to look spectacular even during the daytime. The strip is extremely simple to install on desk edges and has 12 preset cutting points if its maximum 10-foot length is too long for a desk.

RELATED: The Best Gaming Desks You Can Buy in 2023

The Rope Lights for Desks are compatible with Google Home and Amazon Alexa for voice command functionality. Gamers will also appreciate how the lights integrate with Razer Synapse and sync with many popular RGB-enabled keyboards, mice, and headsets. As Govee continues to expand its product line, the Rope Lights can take advantage of AI DreamView Sync which enables enhanced coordinated effects across many of the company's products. On this Prime Day, if you can't afford a new gaming desk, the Govee Rope Lights for Desks is the best alternative to spruce up existing furniture.

The Govee AI Gaming Sync Box offers the most intelligent way yet to fill gaming rooms with RGBIC lighting. Govee uses its CogniGLow algorithm on select PC titles to generate customized lighting effects based on in-game content and events. The sync box connects to 3 HDMI 2.0 sources to eliminate the delayed reactive lighting of camera-based lighting systems. DreamView 360 syncing coordinates lighting across many existing Govee light strips, panels, and bulbs. The Govee AI Gaming Sync Box includes 2 smart tower lights and LED lights for monitors 27 to 34 inches.

Using a box with HDMI inputs to sync movies and games with smart lighting is not a brand-new concept, as the Philips Hue Play introduced the idea several years ago. However, Govee's AI Gaming Sync Box more directly targets gamers, integrating with specific titles like Valorant, Apex Legends, and CS:GO. When certain in-game events happen, the AI Sync Box uses its CogniGlow algorithm to recognize kills, deaths, and achievements and programs attached lighting to respond accordingly. The AI Sync Box for 27-34 inch monitors ships with not only the sync box itself, but also a LED light strip to install on the back of displays, and a pair of RGB light towers.

In Game Rant's review of the Govee AI Sync Box, it was found that using an HDMI cable from a graphics card or PS5 meant that the lighting responded much faster than with camera based systems like the Govee DreamView G1. On the other hand, although innovative, it's not the perfect product at this point. Some gamers may lament the fact that HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort connections aren't supported, which rules out high refresh gaming at 4K. Regardless, the number of supported games continue to grow, and it will be exciting to see how Govee continues to improve on the technology in the months and years to come.

The Nanoleaf Essentials Smart Lightstrip is the best solution to trim gaming rooms with bright and colorful illumination. 16+ million colors provided by the lightstrip's RGBW technology and hundreds of available scenes will never bore friends and family. Users can connect the Essentials Lightstrip to their expanding network of Matter devices running on Thread networks.

Nanoleaf Essentials Smart Bulbs are exceedingly bright and vivid both with tunable white lighting and patterns with 16+ million colors. These bulbs can be controlled over Bluetooth in the Nanoleaf app with an almost endless number of preset and user-created scenes. New to Nanoleaf bulbs is Matter compatibility with the ability to communicate with other Matter smart devices from many brands over blazingly fast Thread networks.

With so many smart LED light strips and bulbs on the market, manufacturers are looking for any possible way to differentiate themselves from the competition. Introducing Matter compatibility into their Essentials line, Nanoleaf hopes to have lights that stay relevant in the evolving smart home scene. Both the 2 meter LED light strip and A19 bulb I tested in recent months were designed to operate best on a Thread network. Unlike traditional lights that work using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, Matter-compatible devices function on a mesh Thread network which allows devices to communicate more instantaneously.

When setup correctly, the Nanoleaf Essentials Smart Lightstrip and Bulb demonstrate the benefits of owning Matter devices. Users can easily add the lights to a variety of smart home apps, regardless of what hardware they normally support. Unfortunately, using Matter lights requires a controller and a Thread border router, although buyers may already own qualifying devices. Smart home hubs like some Google Nests or Amazon Echos can serve as Matter controllers and Thread border routers, with many of Nanoleaf's wall panel lights act as routers as well. As it stands, setting up a proper network for the latest Essentials lights can be costly and frustrating, but such is usually the case when new smart home protocols arrive.

RELATED: How to Create a Gaming Setup with Nanoleaf Smart Light Panels

Buyers can still use these Essentials lights with Bluetooth and the Nanoleaf mobile app, and their performance alone makes them a solid value on this Prime Day 2023. Both the lightstrip and bulb are exceedingly bright and capable of not only a wide array of colors and patterns, but also a variety of warm and cool white hues. Straightforward to install, for anyone looking to make the leap into Matter smart lights, I would recommend picking up either while their discounts last.

Nanoleaf offers a flexible solution to RGB home decor lighting with its Shapes wall lights. Using Connect+ technology, shapes can be interconnected using triangles, mini triangles, and hexagon panels for a completely customizable design. Shapes can sync with moving images on PC monitors, using the Nanoleaf app. Host a concert at home with Shapes lights reacting to pulsating music. Nanoleaf lights are easily mounted on smooth surfaces with included double-sided mounting tape.

With so many spectacular smart lights for sale, it's not an easy decision recommending one over all others. Even so, considering the range of lighting effects and features that they bring with them, Nanoleaf Shapes will instantly become the center of attention in any room. Wall panel lights are what made Nanoleaf so popular to begin with, and with Shapes, the manufacturer has combined the qualities of their best-selling inventions into one product. Shapes are also the most versatile panel lights on the market, since they use Nanoleaf's Connect+ technology to attach to a wide range of hexagons and mini-triangle lights that the company manufactures. Buyers can form an almost endless amount of designs, aided by a layout assistant in Nanoleaf's mobile app.

The brightness and range of colors possible with the Nanoleaf Shapes is impressive enough, but there are numerous other ways to enjoy the lights. Buyers can use touch-gestures to turn the lights on and off, adjust brightness, or toggle between different scenes. As with all Nanoleaf smart lights, there are tons of additional scenes designed by other users available in the Nanoleaf mobile and desktop apps. Gamers will also appreciate the Shapes compatibility with Razer Synapse and Overwolf to sync with peripherals and display game-specific RGB effects. Finally, as previously mentioned, these wall panel lights also function as a Thread border router, making them a great match for recently released Matter compatible lights.

Both the 7 pack of the Triangle and Hexagon Shapes are available at a discount on Prime Day. With the only real negative of the Shapes being the normally high cost per light, now is the perfect time to add them to your gaming room setup.

For more deals, check out:

MORE: The Best Smart Lights in 2023

We hope you like the items we recommend and discuss! Game Rant has affiliate and sponsored partnerships, so we receive a share of the revenue from some of your purchases. This won’t affect the price you pay and helps us offer the best product recommendations.

An avid gamer since childhood, Adam Corsetti became hooked on video games after using the original Nintendo console. During college, he created a site aggregating gaming review scores and wrote features about the industry. Adam has since witnessed the popularity of video games rise further and become part of mainstream culture. Adam's video game interests include simulation, strategy, and sports titles on PC and consoles, as well as peripherals and hardware. As a seasoned freelance writer, he recently joined the Game Rant team and is excited to share his experiences and insights with readers.