Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Smart Addressable Multicolor HD Lightstrip
design
It’s more about what’s happening behind the scenes that makes the Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Smart Addressable Multicolor HD Lightstrip special. At a quick glance you can disregard the first two thirds of that frankly ridiculous name because from the outside it looks just like any other strip. Individually addressable LEDs are evenly spaced along the white front face of the Nanoleaf Essentials HD Lightstrip with a preinstalled strip of 3M adhesive covering the full length of the reverse side. I’ve had the strip mounted vertically up a wall using just a few segments of that sticky tape for the last month or two and it hasn’t budged in the slightest.
There’s a generous 60 LEDs per metre but it’s a little disappointing to see them fully exposed. On a ‘premium’ lightstrip I’d have preferred some diffusion here, not just to avoid visible hotspots with the Nanoleaf Multicolor HD Lightstrip turned on, but also to help it more seamlessly blend into the background when it’s not in use. Admittedly some people may take advantage of the dotted effect it creates so perhaps a second, diffused version or even a separate accessory would do the job. There’s already enough words in the name, surely we could have the Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Smart Addressable Diffused Multicolor HD Lightstrip?
Nanoleaf includes a generous 1.5m power cable that plugs into a reasonably compact controller, it’s all very neat and tidy. That little white box allows for mechanical control of the Multicolor HD Lightstrip if you don’t have your phone handy, though realistically most people will likely tuck it out of sight. If you are looking to hide it, Nanoleaf has snuck a pair of sticky pads on the back to help with mounting in unusual places which is a nice touch.
performance
I’ve been streaming consistently for the past seven or eight years and in that time I’ve cycled through a whole range of background lighting options. From cheap off-brand LED lightstrips, to LED floodlights and even the unique Govee Curtain – when it comes to coloured lights I’ve pretty much tried the lot. After a few weeks with the Nanoleaf Matter Smart Addressable Multicolor HD Lightstrip I can confidently say it’s the best LED lightstrip I’ve used.
One thing is immediately clear when the Nanoleaf Essentials Multicolour HD Lightstrip first fires up, this is an undeniably bright and saturated LED strip. I was impressed by the clarity of each colour, even yellows were rich and clear and that’s consistently the colour I’ve found other strips fail to show off on camera with it usually ending up a washed out white. It played nice with every camera I tested too, from the Elgato Facecam MK2 to the Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra there was no flicker at any brightness level or frame rate. Each individual LED on the Nanoleaf Matter Lightstrip was impressively defined from those around it, allowing for high contrast effects with colours that didn’t bleed into one another.
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Cranking the brightness up to 100% the Nanoleaf Matter Smart Addressable Multicolor HD Lightstrip is noticeably punchy with a smooth enough curve down to lower levels that allows for some neat breathing and movement effects. Despite this raw strength however, the Nanoleaf Essentials Multicolor HD Lightstrip isn’t great at throwing light and I was underwhelmed by how much of my wall it washed. Framed up on my streaming facecam the lightstrip itself and the area closest around it was bright and eye-catching but this quickly dissipated and left the rest of the scene a little more dim than I’d hoped.
Everything is controlled via the Nanoleaf app which on iOS is fine but feels like it could offer so much more. It almost gives the sense of being an early access version of an app, the interface is reasonably tidy but the feature set feels limited because it’s cumbersome to get things dialled in. For choosing basic solid colours or picking a default scene it’s great, the Nanoleaf Essentials Addressable HD Lightstrip is responsive and it’s quick to jump between settings but creating more detailed, personalised scenes is fiddly. It may be a quirk of my Eero Pro Mesh network or just a bug of the current app version, but I’d also have to fully force quit the app every time I closed it otherwise the Nanoleaf HD Lightstrip would fail to connect.
On desktop the experience is smoother, while offering a lot of the same functionality the workflow feels easier to come to terms with and syncing scenes between the two was simple. The desktop app also offers integration with other apps like Overwolf and Razer Chroma which expands the ecosystem nicely. As a streamer though it was disappointing to see no native way to integrate Twitch alerts with the Nanoleaf Essentials HD Lightstrip, this feels like a slam dunk feature and while there are some third-party options I struggled to get them linked up.
summed up
As far as LED strips go, the Nanoleaf Matter Smart Addressable Multicolor HD Lightstrip is a particularly good one. The hardware packs a seriously colourful punch with an impressive peak brightness that comes across nicely on camera. As a point of difference as part of a streamer’s background it’s a nice addition but with no diffusion cover and a lack of thrown light it’s not the perfect solution.
Connectivity is a case of ‘good, but’. The desktop and mobile apps are good with reasonably easy access to colour choices and scene creation, but they could go further with integrations for content creators or to polish out a few quality of life bugs. These are more minor annoyances than big deals though and once the lights are up and running you’ll soon forget about the hoops you had to jump through to get there.
