
Transform your TV setup: WiZ HDMI Sync Box and gradient lights review
Design and setup
If you're not interested in a complicated setup, you're in luck because there's no need to awkwardly mount a camera on top of your TV or go through any complex calibration steps. Simply plug the Sync Box into your streaming box, console, or set-top box, and attach the included RGBIC LED light strip to the back of your TV. I used the model designed for 55- to 65-inch TVs (€89.99), although a version is also available for larger 75- to 85-inch screens (€109.99).
The HDMI Sync Box supports HDMI 2.0 and handles video resolutions up to 4K at 60Hz, with support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. While HDMI 2.1 and support for 4K at 120Hz would have been a welcome bonus, it's entirely forgivable at this price point. Everything links via the WiZ app over Wi-Fi, and you can also use Google Assistant, Alexa, or the optional WiZ remote control for hands-free operation.
Light performance
Once set up, the system impresses with how quickly and accurately the lighting reacts to on-screen content. Colours from your favourite films, games, or shows extend beyond the TV and spill onto your walls, creating a more immersive experience. Explosions glow brighter, sunsets feel warmer, and fantasy worlds look more alive.
The included LED strip wraps around three sides of your TV and produces seamless colour transitions. Depending on your mood or content, you can switch between different sync styles. Cinematic mode delivers smooth, gradual lighting transitions that are ideal for films and TV shows. If you want something more punchy, Vibrant mode offers intense colour saturation that really pops. Relaxation mode brings softer hues to the room for ambient watching, while Rhythmic mode synchronises the lights with audio for music sessions.
There's also a built-in microphone on the Sync Box itself, allowing it to adapt to both sound and visuals. Streaming your favourite playlist or hosting a get-together? The lighting shifts dynamically in sync with the beat, requiring no additional input.
Optional add-ons
To fully immerse yourself, the WiZ Gradient Light Bars (€59.99) and Gradient Floor Light are well worth considering. I tested Light Bars, and they dramatically extend the ambience beyond just the TV wall.
The Gradient Light Bars feature a multicolour segment design that displays multiple hues simultaneously. Each bar can be controlled independently, and mounting them is straightforward. You can place them vertically beside your screen, or horizontally on desks and counters for even more atmospheric wash lighting.
Both lights are also Matter-compatible, allowing you to control them using Alexa, Google Home, or Apple HomeKit, thereby adding even more smart home versatility.
Smart control and sync features
The experience is highly customisable through the WiZ app. You can adjust brightness, colour saturation, intensity, and transition speed. There's even an auto-switching feature so the lights start syncing the moment your HDMI source is powered on.
What's more impressive is that you can link up to 32 WiZ colour-capable lights, as long as they're on the same Wi-Fi network. This opens up the possibility of a full-room immersive lighting setup for serious home cinema fans or RGB enthusiasts.
While the light syncing effect can be immersive during dynamic content, it's not always desirable. For more everyday viewing, I preferred setting a static colour — a simple adjustment via the app.
Verdict
The WiZ HDMI Sync Box and Gradient Lights deliver a seamless, screen-enhancing experience that's immersive, affordable, and surprisingly easy to set up. If you're craving next-level ambience for movies, games or music, this one's a no-brainer.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Irish Sun
13 hours ago
- The Irish Sun
My clever new fridge saves me hundreds on food AND electricity bills – it even has a cool Ring doorbell perk
FRIDGES and freezers are getting in on the smart stuff these days - and they can save you a heap of money in the long-run too. The latest flash model from Samsung has done just that for me, both on food and my electricity bill. Advertisement 5 The Sun's Jamie Harris gives a hi-tech fridge a go Credit: Jamie Harris / The Sun 5 Answering Ring doorbell calls is my favourite trick Credit: Jamie Harris / The Sun 5 It will help you save loads on food shopping too by cutting down on waste Credit: Jamie Harris / The Sun There are a number of mind-boggling techy features your everyday fridge can't do too. Some are better as party tricks to show off to friends but the majority of them have turned out to be super handy in my house. The exact Samsung model I'm trying is the 621L Bespoke AI Series 9 Side-by-Side Fridge Freezer with AI Home (RS90F64EDTEU). So what's so special about it? Advertisement Read more about Samsung Read on in my review below to find out. Samsung Side-by-Side Fridge Freezer review The fridge door has a little display which is your portal to a number of apps. More and more fridge freezers are adopting these sorts of screens - and at one point they were quite big. This one is small and unimposing, allowing you to access things like Spotify and YouTube. Advertisement Most read in Tech It's touch screen and voice powered, so you can essentially do away with having an Alexa or similar digital assistant in your kitchen, especially as the speaker can go pretty loud. The voice assistant is Samsung's own, Bixby, so you'll have to say "Hey Bixby" to summon anything. Samsung reveals genius way to help you save money on food using AI in your FRIDGE For the most part, I just use the touch screen - but there's one special trick that's very much Bixby's. And that's the ability to open the doors for you. Advertisement At first, I dismissed this as a bit of a gimmick (and was what I referred to as a "party trick" earlier). However, truth be told, there have been times when I've been cooking, I have my hands full with items and suddenly this feature has come in handy. The handles do have sensors on them too that automatically opens the door for you when you simply hover your hand over it - I also thought was just plain lazy initially but I've grown to make that the norm all the time now. A minor annoyance to mention, sometimes when I opened the fridge door my elbow passed the sensor for the freezer door causing it to open too. Advertisement 5 The screen is a perfect size Credit: Jamie Harris / The Sun Saving money on food and more What I really care about is saving money and I'm shamefully aware that my food waste could be a whole lot better. Sometimes you forget, other times you have no idea what to do with that one ingredient. Well, Samsung's SmartThings helps you cut food waste, thereby reducing how much I spend on shopping. Advertisement You can log items via the app on your phone - which is available on both Android and iOS, not just Samsung's handsets - or tap them in on your fridge screen, along with their use-by dates. While it's very manual, I've resorted to treating it as my shopping list app as opposed to just using my phone's notes feature as I did before. The fridge will also suggest recipes based on the ingredients logged for some easy ideas, crafted by the likes of Jamie Oliver and more. There are other ways the fridge helps you save money too. Advertisement For instance, it learns your usage patterns so that energy is optimised at the right times. You can even tell it when you're on holiday so it'll go into an energy saving mode. The screen will tell you exactly how much electricity the fridge has used too (last month it was just shy of £10). And as there is a water and ice dispenser, the tech tells you when it's time to change the filter too. Advertisement Inside When it comes to the primary function, keeping your food chilled and frozen, the inside is perfectly ordinary. In the fridge there are five shelves, as well as two fruit and veg compartments at the bottom. And there are four shelves with two storage draws along the bottom of the freezer. Another thing to note is that it's pretty quiet as a fridge freezer goes, despite being a pretty big appliance. 5 A look inside the fridge and freezer Credit: Jamie Harris / The Sun Advertisement Ring doorbell trick My favourite trick of all, arguably, is the simplest. And that's integration with Ring doorbell. SmartThings is compatible with hundreds of smart home brands, not just devices made by Samsung, which is a rare treat. Once you've linked your Ring doorbell into the SmartThings app it means the fridge screen will alert you when someone is at the front door. Advertisement You can even answer the call there and then, so another reason not to have another smart hub sitting around your kitchen. Samsung Side-by-Side Fridge Freezer: conclusion At £2,239, the 621L Bespoke AI Series 9 Side-by-Side Fridge Freezer with AI Home doesn't come cheap. But it's worth noting you get five year warranty for parts and labour, as well as 20 year warranty on digital inverter compressor. You can also knock up to £100 off if you recycle an old appliance with Samsung when making the purchase. Advertisement But for £2,239 you get a premium, slick and feature-packed appliance that should save you hundreds - if not thousands - in the long run with those food and energy management features. Rating: 4/5


Irish Examiner
25-07-2025
- Irish Examiner
Barry O'Sullivan: ChatGPT is not your friend
Artificial intelligence is a broad umbrella term for computer systems that perform tasks that we think of as requiring human intelligence – and, despite all the fuss about it lately, we've been using it for decades. There are AI systems that learn, that can process natural language, that can play complex games and be strategic, that can interpret visual scenes and images, and so on. We use AI systems every day. Some examples include satellite navigation systems in cars and mobile phones, voice assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, the features of streaming platforms such as Netflix or Spotify that suggest what you might enjoy next, news items on social media feeds are selected for us using AI, and even the Google search engine itself. AI is ubiquitous in our lives. The term itself was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, in a proposal for a summer project at Dartmouth. An interesting connection to Ireland: McCarthy's father, John Patrick, was from Cromane in County Kerry and emigrated to the USA where his genius son was born. Since its widespread release in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT has probably become the most widely talked about artificial intelligence technology in the world. It is an example of a Large-Language Model – an LLM - which can generate plausible text in response to a question or search query, often referred to as a prompt, on every conceivable topic. ChatGPT, and other similar chatbots, such as Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, can write very sophisticated answers in terms of content style. For example, one could ask for an essay on the 1916 Rising written in the rhyming style of Dr Seuss, and ChatGPT will generate a response instantly and rather brilliantly. ChatGPT is a cutting-edge chatbot, built using state-of-the-art machine-learning AI methods. It has been trained on everything one can possibly read in electronic form: the entire worldwide web, digitally available books, research papers, policy documents, newspapers, and many other electronic materials. In a sense it has read everything humans have ever written and which can be accessed online or in digital form. The technical achievement in producing LLM-based chatbots, like ChatGPT, is astonishing. They seemingly have read everything that the entirety of humankind has produced and they can instantly respond with sophisticated and plausible answers to any question we would like to pose. Does that mean that these systems have superhuman understanding and expertise? Are these systems truly artificially intelligent? In a word: No. The problems of chatbots While ChatGPT and other LLMs can instantly generate sophisticated answers, they suffer from a number of problems. They don't really understand what they have read. Instead, informally speaking, they have learned that particular sequences of words tend to occur with other sequences of words. In the AI world we say that these systems lack a commonsense understanding of the world. Whether the text is true or false means nothing to them. They often generate text that is misleading or downright incorrect. They 'hallucinate', meaning they invent things that are not true. There is no harm intended, but because they don't understand the world or what they are saying, they are essentially 'stochastic parrots', as a well-known research paper has described LLMs. The analogy I like to use comes from Killinaskully and specifically Pat Shortt's character Dan Clancy who sits between his friends in Jacksie's Bar. Ask Dan anything you want. He'll answer you earnestly and to the best of his ability. He might make up a few details along the way, unintentionally of course. Maybe you'd prefer him to close his eyes and recite his answer poetically with his hand on his heart and in the style of Padraig Pearse. No problem. While this analogy is somewhat facetious, it demonstrates the challenges that arise when one uses ChatGPT and other LLMs in specific settings. Barry O'Sullivan: 'If a user believes in a conspiracy theory, for example, the user could use a chatbot like ChatGPT to engage in a dialogue that has the consequence of confirming the user's beliefs.' Picture: LinkedIn The purpose of an LLM is to generate plausible text, ideally that the user will engage with so it can be refined further. One can get into a conversation with an LLM by tweaking the original prompt. For example, ask ChatGPT to tell you how to prepare a roast chicken, it will respond with detailed instructions, but you might feel that you'd prefer the skin to be a little crispier and articulate that. ChatGPT will offer up a revised response, hopefully a more acceptable one. It is easy to see how one can direct a conversation to get a desired outcome. While this is helpful to make sure that we have a good chance of cooking our dinner the way we would like it, if we are asking questions about things that are troubling us, or we're seeking advice, or we're trying to get reassurance about our perspective on things, using an AI tool that does not have an understanding of what it is saying can have significant consequences. AI chatbots, LLMs and systems such as ChatGPT, are being increasingly used to find information about personal matters, offer life advice, or even as personal therapists. The ELIZA effect refers to the tendency to project human characteristics onto chatbots. ELIZA was a chatbot developed at MIT in 1966 and simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing statements made by the user into questions which had the effect of prompting the user to offer up increasingly more emotional and personal details. 'AI psychosis' Recently, there has been a growing focus on 'AI psychosis', where users with mental health issues like schizophrenia can have paranoid delusions fuelled by chatbots, although there is yet no clinical literature on this. Chatbots based on LLMs can be prompted by users in a way that increases the chances of inaccurate information being presented to them. If a user believes in a conspiracy theory, for example, the user could use a chatbot to engage in a dialogue that has the consequence of confirming the user's beliefs. An LLM-based chatbot doesn't understand what it is generating as output, and is trying to find a response that the user will be satisfied with. There is no intentional manipulation at play but, nonetheless, this can be a harmful recipe. LLM-based chatbots can be used to re-confirm a harmful perspective that no real person would confirm unless they had a malicious intent. Adding in the narrative that these AI systems are approaching superhuman capabilities can give them a god-like status in the minds of vulnerable users. AI technology is extremely powerful and impactful, and, therefore, comes with enormous responsibility on those making it available to ensure that it can be used safely and ethically. There is much excitement and hype around AI at the moment. It is important that hype is challenged, that we keep our feet on the ground, and that we maintain a watchful eye on its impacts. Gaining literacy in AI is now an important life skill and one of the reasons that under the European Union's AI Act there are specific obligations on the providers and deployers of AI technology on this very topic. AI, in my opinion, has been an overwhelming positive technology, but we must pay attention to the risks and deal with these matters through technological advances as well as education and literacy initiatives. Barry O'Sullivan is a professor at the School of Computer Science & IT at University College Cork, founding director of the Research Ireland Centre for Research Training on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the Irish Government's AI Advisory Council, and former Vice Chair of the European High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence Read More Gen Z Student: Knowing my own essays will be graded against the work of AI is disheartening


Irish Examiner
24-07-2025
- Irish Examiner
Transform your TV setup: WiZ HDMI Sync Box and gradient lights review
The WiZ HDMI Sync Box and Gradient Light Bars offer a more affordable alternative to something like Philips' Hue HDMI Sync Box, allowing you to turn your living room into an immersive light show. Design and setup If you're not interested in a complicated setup, you're in luck because there's no need to awkwardly mount a camera on top of your TV or go through any complex calibration steps. Simply plug the Sync Box into your streaming box, console, or set-top box, and attach the included RGBIC LED light strip to the back of your TV. I used the model designed for 55- to 65-inch TVs (€89.99), although a version is also available for larger 75- to 85-inch screens (€109.99). The HDMI Sync Box supports HDMI 2.0 and handles video resolutions up to 4K at 60Hz, with support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. While HDMI 2.1 and support for 4K at 120Hz would have been a welcome bonus, it's entirely forgivable at this price point. Everything links via the WiZ app over Wi-Fi, and you can also use Google Assistant, Alexa, or the optional WiZ remote control for hands-free operation. Light performance Once set up, the system impresses with how quickly and accurately the lighting reacts to on-screen content. Colours from your favourite films, games, or shows extend beyond the TV and spill onto your walls, creating a more immersive experience. Explosions glow brighter, sunsets feel warmer, and fantasy worlds look more alive. The included LED strip wraps around three sides of your TV and produces seamless colour transitions. Depending on your mood or content, you can switch between different sync styles. Cinematic mode delivers smooth, gradual lighting transitions that are ideal for films and TV shows. If you want something more punchy, Vibrant mode offers intense colour saturation that really pops. Relaxation mode brings softer hues to the room for ambient watching, while Rhythmic mode synchronises the lights with audio for music sessions. There's also a built-in microphone on the Sync Box itself, allowing it to adapt to both sound and visuals. Streaming your favourite playlist or hosting a get-together? The lighting shifts dynamically in sync with the beat, requiring no additional input. Optional add-ons To fully immerse yourself, the WiZ Gradient Light Bars (€59.99) and Gradient Floor Light are well worth considering. I tested Light Bars, and they dramatically extend the ambience beyond just the TV wall. The Gradient Light Bars feature a multicolour segment design that displays multiple hues simultaneously. Each bar can be controlled independently, and mounting them is straightforward. You can place them vertically beside your screen, or horizontally on desks and counters for even more atmospheric wash lighting. Both lights are also Matter-compatible, allowing you to control them using Alexa, Google Home, or Apple HomeKit, thereby adding even more smart home versatility. Smart control and sync features The experience is highly customisable through the WiZ app. You can adjust brightness, colour saturation, intensity, and transition speed. There's even an auto-switching feature so the lights start syncing the moment your HDMI source is powered on. What's more impressive is that you can link up to 32 WiZ colour-capable lights, as long as they're on the same Wi-Fi network. This opens up the possibility of a full-room immersive lighting setup for serious home cinema fans or RGB enthusiasts. While the light syncing effect can be immersive during dynamic content, it's not always desirable. For more everyday viewing, I preferred setting a static colour — a simple adjustment via the app. Verdict The WiZ HDMI Sync Box and Gradient Lights deliver a seamless, screen-enhancing experience that's immersive, affordable, and surprisingly easy to set up. If you're craving next-level ambience for movies, games or music, this one's a no-brainer.