I was pretty sceptical when Benq approached me about their ScreenBar monitor light.
But after using it for a while... I was really surprised at how much more
comfortable it is to work, (AND PLAY)
And how much of a difference this Light made, to my productivity.
I am Alex and Today I will share my experience using these two monitor lights
and show you how they helped me in my productivity setup.
Each day we spend on average nearly 6 hours in front of a computer screen or a monitor.
Most issues with eye strain and headaches
come from staring at computer screens without sufficient ambient lighting.
A problem that, up until now... I have been used to solving with a desk lamp,
and general-purpose room lighting.
The Benq ScreenBar at the time of recording costs about $100 dollars so
it is a lot more expensive than a standard desk lamp.
The thing is, this is not just a desk lamp replacement!
With no perceptible flickering and no blue-light hazard,
this light was designed with comfort in mind.
It provides a really wide range of options of colour temperature and brightness.
It goes from 2700 Kevin which is a very warm light,
better for relaxing to a much cooler 6500 Kelvin
which is great for focused work. This is the mode I use the most to be honest.
And because it goes on top of your monitor, it also saves space on your desk.
And being USB powered... it means one less power
socket for you to worry about, which makes cable management a lot easier.
In fact, the cable itself is a flat cable so can be easily hidden away.
And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know this product EVEN EXISTED until Benq reached
out but... once I started using it… It quickly became one of my favourite productivity hacks.
To give you an idea about the flickering, I’ve slowed down the camera here to 120 FPS.
And you can see how a standard light bulb or even LED bulb
introduces a flicker that although not perceptive to our eyes...
it does impact our eye comfort after long sessions.
In addition to that, to be able to have enough light in the workspace
using a traditional desk lamp,
you’d be introducing quite a bit of glare on the screen which is not ideal.
And that glare kind of defeats the purpose of having good lighting.
I found that even some of the more expensive light bulbs like these Philips Hue ones...
don’t really work that well for a desk setup.
They are ok as ambient lighting but from a brightness point of view,
there are even cheaper lights out there that will provide brighter options.
And even if we did find a good LED light bulb, we’d still have the glare issue.
To give you an idea, you can see here that...
it doesn't matter where I place this light bulb, the glare would be there on the screen.
My monitor is quite good at not reflecting much light anyway, but it’s still there as you can see!
Some other monitors like the Apple monitors for example may add quite a bit more
reflection than this, all of which adds to eye strain... and discomfort.
The ScreenBar has an asymmetrical design
which means the light comes down and away from the screen which is really quite smart.
As you can see here the light is not hitting the monitor directly.
And that is really important whether you are doing jobs that require your
monitor's colour accuracy, like photo editing,
colour grading in video editing or even long sessions on Excel spreadsheets.
Your eyes will appreciate the even level of light covering
not just the screen but your peripheral vision.
So at the end of a long working session your eyes won't feel as irritated or strained.
At least that's my experience with it so far.
And even on an Ultrawide curved monitor,
the light is still not hitting the monitor which is really cool.
I’ve done a few videos on my setup and how I try to
make this tiny space as productive as it can be...
with comfortable sitting and decent monitor for example.
So anything that helps me stay productive for longer is worth the money.
The light itself complies with the American Standard practice for office lighting for example.
It provides 500 LUX and it lights a decent
area of your workspace as well so if you are writing, or reading material on the side…
This can be either on paper or on a tablet, while you work on a main screen,
this uniform lighting makes it really comfortable to work,
especially when you are trying to work for longer periods.
I do a lot of video editing every week and having a 9-5 job like many other creators, it means my
video editing is usually done in the evenings, after dinner, after putting children to bed...
So I am usually already knackered by this time so having a decent level of lighting
while I work makes me feel less tired.
It helps my eyes to feel less irritated which makes this whole creating process
a lot more pleasant and fun!
A couple of negatives here guys. The first one is the auto dimming.
When you have the auto-dimming turned on, it is meant to work out how much ambient
lighting you already have in the room to then auto-adjust the brightness.
But for me, this seems to have a mind of its own,
and maybe that’s because my lighting conditions are constantly changing (Because you know… UK)
But at night time when it matters the most, this works really well.
During the day I prefer to just use it in manual brightness.
The other one is control - even though the touch control on the manual dimmer here is
very responsive, it does takes a while to get used to holding it down to make your adjustment.
Single tapping it also works but it’s hard to tell when you have reached maximum brightness.
And the same goes for the Hue adjustment.
The instructions say you should hold it down…to adjust the brightness which is OK.
You hold it down and just let go when you are happy with the adjustment.
If you don’t let go it will stop at the maximum.
And you touch it again it will start to decrease.
Which is fine but would be nice to have a way of knowing when you reached maximum brightness.
Before we talk about Build quality, just a very quick reminder guys...
I am building a really nice library of content here for you.
And I am having a lot of fun creating these videos.
But it would be a lot more fun if you joined me.
So if you are enjoying this video, it would mean the world to me if you hit
that thumbs up - and even better if you subscribed to my channel.
In terms of build quality you can tell this product has had a lot of thinking put into it.
This counterweight extends to work with different monitors,
from very thin to the chunkier ones up to 3CM thick and like mine here, even curved ones.
It has a nice rubberised padding in all of the parts where it touches your monitor,
so it’s not going to scratch your screen should you want to sell it on later.
It stays very stable on top of the screen and you can adjust the angle
of the light by simply twisting it in the direction you want.
The entire light feels very sturdy and very smooth to operate. There are much
cheaper knock-off versions out there but from what I can tell won't last very long
and could have an adverse effect if you get a poor quality light.
This light is very bright too!
Pro tip: Dont look straight into it, it's like the Sun!
Benq also sent the baby one, which is the ScreenBar Lite which is for laptops.
Very much like the bigger brother, the ScreenBar Lite does the same job but for laptop working.
I love how compact this is, and how easily you could pack this in
your bag and take it to your office or hotel room.
In addition to the same touch controls from the bigger version,
the ScreenBar Lite has a "My Favourite" button.
Simply long press this to save the current setting as your favourite. That's pretty neat!
Links to both ScreenBar and ScreenBar Lite down in the description for you guys.
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I will see you and your smiling faces, on the next one.