TV Bias Lighting or TV backlight is best upgrade for your television or computer

This Little Known Gadget Will Forever Change Your TV Viewing Experience!

It’s 2018, so it’s safe to assume that you spend the lion’s share of your time looking at a screen. You’re actually, believe it or not, staring at one right this instant. And it’s no secret that prolonged gazing into a brutal light source is not good for you, but that’s not stopping you. You have probably felt its adverse effects in your life.

Whether it’s a surprise headache right before a deadline at work, or tears rolling down your Cheetoh-dusted cheeks during a Netflix binge, eye fatigue is real, and it’s about time we did something about it.

Bias lighting is the answer.

In the spirit of transparency, we should mention that we are the #1 seller of bias lighting on Amazon with over 3,000 reviews and 4.5 star rating. Here's the mandatory plug our product, the Luminoodle Bias Light, and that's all we'll mention about it until the end of the article.

What is Bias Lighting?

Bias lighting is a light that is placed a behind a TV or computer monitor to provide the ambient light around the screen without shining directly into the viewer’s eyes. This simple solution improves contrast ratio through balanced white TV accent lighting and reduces eye strain caused by changes in picture brightness from scene to scene in games, shows, movies, and browsing the web.

TV Bias lighting improves your screen time

Bias Lighting Reduces Eye-Strain and Fatigue

Our eyes are like tractor beams for light, made of 2 kinds of receptors, cones and rods.

Cones - perceive color and live right smack-dab in the middle of our retinas. When we look at something directly, our cones are hard at work collecting color and detail.

Rods - are very sensitive and work at very low levels of light. They live on the periphery, taking in ambient light and cue our pupils to dilate which either increase the amount of light our eyes receive in low light or decrease the amount of light in bright conditions.

Our eyes are happiest and work the best when rods and cones are working together in harmony. Ultimately this is why bias lighting is helpful in reducing eyestrain.

Eye Fatigue and strain from watching TV or playing video games

There are 3 reasons we experience eye fatigue when staring at a screen in a dark room:

1. Overloading your cones with a bright, concentrated light source (your TV or monitor).
2. Under-saturating your rods from a lack of ambient lighting.
3. Frequent pupil dilation from the extreme light changes on the screen.

When you look directly at a screen in a dark room your eyes will dilate which causes your cones to overload with bright color and detail. Meanwhile, your rods are working hard to make sense of your surroundings in the darkness all around you, but don't have enough light to work properly. This is because when there is no ambient light in the room, your rods have no light to work with.

On top of this, since the main source of light in the room is the screen, which constantly changes from bright to dark, your eyes are constantly dilating big-small-big-small-big-small...

When your eyes’ cones and rods are able to work together, fatigue is much less likely. The best way to relieve eye strain while watching TV is to leave the lights on, but let’s get real: most of us would rather die than watch TV with screen-glare from the lights on.

Computer monitor backlight or bias lighting

Bias lighting is a simple and elegant way to create ambient light for your rods to look at while your cones are busy tripping out over The Fast and the Furious 18 (what number are we on now?). The constant background light gives your rods the light they need so your eyes don't dilate from nickels to pinheads 20 times a minute.

Bias Lighting Increases Your Screen's Contrast

On first thought, adding light to the back of your TV is the same as watching with the lights on. On first look, however, you’ll probably change your mind. Adding a bias light to your TV actually improves how the image on your screen looks, and doesn't have the drawback of added glare. It makes the TV appear to have higher contrast, and better overall picture quality.

Technically speaking, a bias light doesn’t increase the contrast of your TV, but it helps your eyes see more contrast from the screen.

To quickly illustrate how this works, take a look at this optical illusion:

Does the gray bar above appear to change color?

The skinny bar in the middle of the illusion is actually a constant shade of gray, although it doesn’t appear that way. On the side with the lighter background, the gray bar appears darker and richer whereas against the dark background, the gray bar appears a bit washed out and white.

Now apply this concept to your TV watching experience; if you illuminate the wall behind your TV with bias lighting, the blacks and grays on your TV screen will appear much darker and richer!

Bias Lighting Improves Your Screen's Colors

Have you ever spent time in a room that's lit with only red, blue, or green light? As time goes on, everything starts to look really, really weird. Are all the objects in the room really losing their color and changing to shades of red?

Of course not.

Billy's shirt didn't actually change from blue to black, there's just no blue light for your eyes to receive and your brain is really struggling to interpret everything.

We've already gone over how our eyes see colors using receptors called cones, but there's another important detail. Our cones can only see 3 colors: red, blue and green. So where do all the other colors come from then? Well, our brain interprets mixtures of these three base colors and then gives us colors in between. This works great most the time, but it has one major flaw. It's all relative.

Bias lighting improves your TV's colors and contrast

You have similar, but less extreme, problems watching TV. The brightness and colors on the screen are constantly changing, and your brain doesn't have a solid frame of reference for colors. By adding a solid-unchanging light behind your TV that your mind can use for a reference, it will improve how you perceive the colors on the screen.

Check out the photo above of the lavender field with and without a bias light, and decide for yourself which screen really looks like lavender.

What Color Temperature Bias Light is Best?

The most important consideration when selecting a bias light for your television or monitor is the color temperature of the light. The color temperature you select will set the white reference point for your brain which will affect how you perceive the colors on the screen. Color temperature for lights is measured in the unit of absolute temperature, Kelvin, with the symbol K.

6500K is the best light for backlighting your TV or monitor

A lower Kelvin rating means the light is warmer, with more red and orange tones, while the higher the rating means the light is cooler with a blue tone. The two standard colors for white LED bulbs today are warm white (2700K) and daylight (5000K). Warm white gives off a nice cozy, calming and inviting ambivalence while daylight give off a more lively and invigorating light similar to the sun.

While any bias light is better than no bias light during your Netflix and chill, not all are created equal when it comes to making the picture pop. If you want your TV to really shine, you’ll want the color temperature of the bias light to match the color temperature your TV or monitor manufacturer uses to back-light the display. Most TVs and monitors fall somewhere between 6000K and 6500K, so your best bet is to get one in that range.

If you’re bias light is too warm, say 2700K, your TV will look out of place and the colors will look muddy. If you choose a cooler bias light, 7000K or more for example, the whites on your TV will look boring and gray.

The original Luminoodle Bias Lighting is equipped with high quality, 6500K LED’s that provide up to 275 lumens of ambient light. We also have a colorful model, the Luminoodle Color Bias Lighting, which allows you to select from 15 light color options to customize your viewing experience further. We also just launched our latest and greatest, Luminoodle Pro Bias LIghting, which has both true-white 6,500K LEDs and color-changing LEDs (RGB+W) to get the best of both worlds. It is the boss of all bias lights.

For added convenience, all Luminoodle Bias lighting products are powered by a USB port, and chances are, there’s one right on the back of your TV.

Meet Luminoodle Bias Lighting

INSTALLS IN UNDER 5 MINUTES

Install it in minutes by securing the bias light to the back of your screen with the heavy-duty 3m adhesive tape.

TURNS ON/OFF WITH YOUR TV

Plug it into your television or monitor to have it turn on and off with your screen or use any 1A USB power source.

WORKS ON ANY SIZE SCREEN

There are 4 sizes available to fit on any size screen with the ability to trim the backlight down for the perfect fit, everytime.

Which Luminoodle is Best For You?

Just follow these 3 easy steps:

1. Pick which color options and features you'd prefer

2. Select the Right Length For Your TV or Monitor

It's important to select the right size bias light so that you get an even distribution of light around your screen. We have 4 sizes to choose from to ensure the right fit for you.

3. Install and Enjoy!

Luminoodle Bias Lighting is super easy to install! Within a few minutes, you'll be reaping the benefits of having true white ambient lighting directly behind your screen. Watch the video below to see how quickly it installs:

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About Us

Power Practical is a small 4-person team based in Salt Lake City, UT, but don't let that fool you... we are Amazon's top seller of bias lighting with over 150,000 sold. Our highest priority is to design and build practical, high-quality products then back them 100% with our amazing customer service. You might have even seen us on Shark Tank where we landed a deal with Mark Cuban.