Great, but Wait for a Good Sale

Well friends, it’s the holiday season and there’s no shortage of smart light companies selling bright, deeply saturated RGB string lights. And if you’ve gone looking for that kind of thing in the past few years, you’ve almost certainly encountered Govi, one of the most visible names in smart lighting.

Govi makes smart lights for almost any situation you can imagine, from A19 RGB bulbs to LED sticks that illuminate corners, to mesh string lights that let you paint your hedges with pixel art. You can make your home completely Lisa Frank Fever’s dream by using the products of this company.

A new entry to its vast catalog is the Govi ​​Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism. yes, he is light prismNot prism lights. It’s a modular set of soffit lights with tricolor lamps that you can use to accentuate your home’s ceiling and illuminate the paths around it, or to spray your walls with obnoxiously vibrant gradients of color, Homeowners Association busybodies be damned.

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It seems like there are millions of smart soffit lights available on Amazon from countless alphabet soup brands, ranging from very cheap to quite expensive. The reason you may have heard of Govee, and not Letyenpai or Poofzy, is because Govee is a real company that has an app that’s actually nice to use. Plus, thanks to the Matter Protocol, most of its new lights are compatible with every major smart home platform, with no disadvantages.

After testing the Lites Prism in my garage for a week, I found them to be responsive, reliable, and even fun to use. They are quite easy to install. The lights are modular and come in manageable 6-lamp sections. Each of these lamps comes with a sticky 3M backing that quickly attaches to my garage’s wooden soffit and makes it easy to secure them with screws or, if necessary, Govi’s included anchors. (For the purposes of this review, I only used adhesive.) You’ll connect the lights to the controller’s long cable that includes all the lights’ connectivity and smarts, and that in turn will connect to the power adapter.

View Govee Outdoor Lights Prism on Amazon

One problem I had was that the controller’s cable, which was about 12 feet long when I measured it hastily, was still too short to reach the point where I wanted to trigger the lights. This is a problem because without an extension cable, I couldn’t wrap them around my garage without doubling the lights. It would have helped if Govi ​​had added a splitter, as I could send one segment in one direction, and the rest in the other.

Lights Prism lamps are its main distinguishing feature. Unlike all those run-of-the-mill soffit lights I mentioned, Govee’s RGB lamps can blast out three colors at once, each at a different brightness level, creating a much more subtle or potentially garish light! The lights themselves are bright, at least when using the single section I set up for testing.

These are not triple LEDs extremely As artificial as it may sound. For one thing, they let you direct the light. Combined, they form the full light cone you see when all illuminated, but each of their rays points in a different direction and, with only one or two LEDs lit, can be used as a kind of spotlight. I was turning off most lights at night but shining specific rays on doors and windows. I would also try using it indoors to highlight some of the larger pieces of artwork I have in my basement, although it would be difficult to pull it off well.

Ignoring the triple LED thing, the Govee Lights Prism puts out good light on the soffits of my garage from at least eight feet above the ground. I can’t say whether the same would be true if I installed them under my second floor ceiling.

The big thing I think will keep most people away from these lights is the price: starting at $540 for a 100-foot kit, they are expensive. Sure, a fully integrated soffit lighting setup will potentially cost thousands of dollars if you consider professional installation, but you can get lights similar to these at a lower price. Even Govee’s own Permanent Outdoor Lights Pro, which uses a single LED lamp, is $100 cheaper for the same length of light.

The problem is that Govi’s lights seem cheaply made and that makes me question their longevity. If I want something that looks cheap, there are actually a lot of options AreAnd if I wanted to spend more money, I don’t think I’d be so attracted to the Goveez Lights’ triple LEDs as to not buy the affordable Festavia Permanent Outdoor String Lights from Philips Hue, a company generally known for its high-quality and long-lasting products, After all, even the Hue bulbs I bought nearly a decade ago still work as good as the day I bought them,

Semi-Pro Lighting Show

Goviz is known for its fancy lighting effects, and Lights Prism is no slouch here. The Govi ​​app is chock-full of options for different looping effects – you can go with pre-made effects, roll your own looping effect and light gradient combinations, choose from effects created by other Govi ​​users, and much more.

Not surprisingly, you can also ask the AI ​​to create average effects. For example, when I asked the lights to mimic forest light, the app created an effect that made the light slowly creep across the string, to mimic daylight breaking through leaves in an overhead canopy. It was okay, but it lacked the kind of simulated random swings in the trees that I would have tried to create.

I found other effects much more attractive. Many of the pre-made ones fit into categories like “festival,” “happy-go-lucky,” or “universe.” They can be as simple as a light pulsed light or more complex, with the lamp’s individual LEDs blinking and flashing. There are also some licensed effects, such as zootopia 2But to really get any benefit from them you’ll need Govi’s net-style lighting.

I especially liked the music synchronization effect, probably because basically, I’m just an ordinary monkey who wants to be entertained. Govi’s effects really shine with three-light lamps as they allow for more detailed gradients, or allowing each lamp’s individual lights to be turned on and off for a more vibrant display than single light sources. It’s all cheesy.

Of course, any way Govi ​​does this – using the microphone on the light or using your smartphone to pick up signals from outside music – is no more than cheap entertainment. The onboard mic is more accurate, but is sensitive to other noises spoiling it, while syncing using your smartphone’s microphone introduces so much latency that the effect may even be completely random.

I can see using the music effects for a backyard karaoke party or something. But I will never oblige my neighbors to see what amounts to a TEMU version of those Christmas light shows that go viral every year when some stage lighting professional goes crazy with the Disney soundtrack or something.

Case matters, but you still need the Govi ​​app

The best thing going for Govi ​​these days is that, from 2023 onwards, the company is working hard to support Matter. This is great for a few reasons. One is that any Matter-compliant smart light you buy from Govi ​​will work with whatever smart home platform you use, assuming you don’t get some obscure, non-Matear-supporting one.

Additionally, Miter-certified devices are required to work even when your internet is down. So, if you’re smart enough to have Lites Prism on your local network, but away from the wider internet, they’re still controllable.

All that said, you won’t be able to leave the Govee app if you want to do anything more complex than turn the lights on and off or set the brightness or color of an entire string at once. Matter doesn’t support that granularity, and none of the major smart home platforms have any kind of easy, built-in support for lighting effects.

Good lighting, but wait for a good sale to buy

The Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism is a much easier alternative to more invasive, integrated installation, which would require professionals to cut holes in your soffit and install lights, which they would wire directly into your home. And with three LEDs per lamp, it produces a far more detailed lighting effect than any other permanent string light on the market at the moment.

The problem with all of this is the price. Sure, the Lite’s Prism is cheaper than those professional installations I just mentioned, but the physical product doesn’t feel like it’s worth the $540 price tag, at least. It’s hard to get away from this, especially when Philips Hue has a cheaper version of this concept that doesn’t have the triple-LED gimmick. It’s strange to see that Philips Hue lights cost more than anything else from a distance Similar, but it’s there.

Still, Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism Are Pretty neat, they work with all the major smart home platforms, and I wouldn’t mind if I owned them. So it’s a good thing that Govee never keeps its products at their street price for long, especially during the holiday season, when prices drop as everyone competes for your gifting dollars. If you’re in the market for fancy outdoor smart lights and you see a really good deal on the Lights Prism – I mean cheaper than Hue – then go for it.

View Govee Outdoor Lights Prism on Amazon