Frequently Asked Questions

Does the MediaLight change colors?

No. Our entire raison d'être is the manufacture of reference quality video white bias lights. If you want to make your wall turn green, blue or red, we can't help you. However, if you are ready to elevate your home theater experience by doing something that improves the quality of the colors and contrast on your screen, you've come to the right place. 

Do the lights turn on and off with the TV?

It depends.

Some manufacturers make this claim about their LED lights, however, this is false advertising at worst and misleading at best. The lights will turn on and off with the TV only on TVs that cut off power to the USB port when the TV is turned off. 

Don't all TVs do this?  
No, they don't. 

Some TVs leave the USB port on when the TV is off. Other TVs turn the USB port on and off every 10 seconds when the TV is turned off (Sony Bravia, for example).  

This is why we include an AC adapter and a remote control with our MediaLights for TV.  You can teach the remote control commands to your universal remote or smart hub with IR blaster.


This leads us to our next popular question:

What's covered under the 5 year warranty?

Everything is covered. 

"The dog chewed my remote control"
"The basement flooded and took my home theatre with it."





By the way, if your dog swallowed the remote control, you can try pressing the dog's stomach to activate your MediaLight. 


Yes, they do.


We use premium LED chips, which are selected within a very narrow window of color temperature accuracy and color rendering index.

All SMD (LED) chips have slightly different color, brightness and spectral characteristics due to variations in the manufacturing process. These are sorted (binned) so all chips of similar characteristics are binned together. Those with the best (in our case, closest to the D65 standard illuminant), are sold at a premium. The less ideal or wider tolerance chips are cheaper.

The minimum color rendering index (CRI) for a MediaLight in 2019 is 95 Ra. They've improved over time.  In our first year (2016), our lights were just over 91 Ra.  Our MediaLight Pro has an extremely solid CRI of 99 Ra. We're very pleased with how far technology has come over the last 3 years. 


One of the most popular brands of LED backlights on Amazon has a CRI below 75. MediaLight has a CRI of 95. To put that in perspective, it would cost us one-tenth as much to use LEDs with a CRI of 80 and the competing strip isn't even that high. 

We won't often be the cheapest option, but we believe that our markups are more modest than those selling systems made with inferior chips. 

Will I really see a difference compared to cheaper lights?


What do you think about lights that change colours with the TV?

Eh. We don't mess with any of that stuff, but we're not here to argue. Buy what you want to buy. Light bleed is something that most people try to eliminate, not add. In the worst cases, it makes the picture look desaturated and the colours seldom match the TV.  Worst of all, it's often laggy. If you are an OCD type (our #1 type of customer!), it might drive you bananas. There's plenty to find wrong. All. The. Time.

However, if you are going to spend that kind of money on coloured lights, we'd argue that you'd get more bang for the buck and cover a similar amount of wall space by purchasing a larger display. With a 65"-90" display, the picture is very immersive. When Philips launched Ambilight in 2004, TVs were maxing out at around 40"-50". There was still some bare wall -- not that this excuses Philips, but coloured lights look silly on an 85" screen.

Do your lights change colours? Are they warm white? Are they cool white? 

No. Everyone has opinions about what looks best. We have science and standards. Our lights are certified by the Imaging Science Foundation Every MediaLight.  From the $25 Eclipse to our most expensive units is ISF certified. 

If you look on the message forums, you can read about cool white, warm white and rainbow coloured bias lights until your eyes glaze over. If any of them did what they were supposed to do, we wouldn't have been able to carve out a niche charging considerably more for our lights (fun fact: our manufacturing costs are higher than their retail prices and our profit margins are much lower).

If you are a professional colourist, we made The MediaLight for you.  If you care about home theatre and know the value of a calibrated display, we made The MediaLight for you. 


Reference bias lighting is all about making the picture look as the director intended. We are perhaps less dogmatic than some -- if you like coloured lights flashing on your walls, we're not going to try to talk you out of them. After all, there is no accounting for taste. 

However, placing colour behind the display alters our perception of what is on the display. This is just how our eyes and brains work. A warmer colour like orange or red behind the display will make everything on the screen look bluer. A cooler colour temperature like blue, will make everything look more red. This might not be disastrous when watching The Bachelorette, but you wouldn't want to do it in your colouring suite or while watching Breaking Bad. 

Are the MediaLight Bias Lights exact D65? 



We're a bit wary of companies who call their products "perfect" or "exact D65" to charge more and prefer to not to engage in this practice.  Our products are compliant with industry stands. We're pleased about how well we stack up and the Imaging Science Foundation agrees.  We're ISF-certified and our lights are tested for colour accuracy. We prefer to underpromise and overdeliver. 











Is the MediaLight powerful enough for my monster 85" TV?



This works pretty well.  :)


Can the strip be cut?


Does The MediaLight bias light emit a blueish light?


One reason why we use a black strip instead of a white strip, which would be more efficient, is that white strips can interfere more with the colour temperature than black PCB strips, especially as they age.  (Look at the white finishes of electronics that sit out for any length of time).

Experts agree that a bias light should be the colour of sunlight on a hazy day, or something called the CIE D65 standard illuminant. We used a calibrated Photo Research SpectraScan PR-650 and Sekonic C7000 to measure our component light emitting diodes.  Our partners then test them on their PR-670 to verify our findings. 


Our lights are not only accurate enough for home use, they are used by professionals who colour grade the videos we enjoy on our home theatre systems. In fact, if you are a professional with an account with Flanders Scientific, we highly recommend buying The MediaLight from them.

What is the colour rendering index (CRI) of your LED's?

As of 2018, all of our LED's have a CRI of at least 95 Ra.  Our popular MediaLight Pro has a CRI of 99 Ra -- an industry first.

Are your Bias Lights D65 compliant?

Our bias lights are very accurate - more accurate in fact than fluorescent bias lighting solutions -- with a high CRI and a correlated colour temperature of 6500K.  



Can I buy the MediaLight without a dimmer?

In a word, no, but it's because good bias lighting needs to be adjusted.  




The wire to the remote looks awfully short...


What about your company? What expertise do you bring to the bias light space? is a division of Scenic Labs. Founded in 2009, we are the publishers of Joe Kane's Digital Video Essentials (HD Basics, UHD, and more), as well as Knowhow Picture Perfect -- the top selling TV optimisation programme in the world. Before that, our founders worked in the same industry and with Joe Kane for another decade. So, you could say that we live and breathe home theatre reference standards in everything we do. Thanks to our specialty we have access to the domain expertise of some great imaging scientists, as well as some really cool lab tools.  


A similarly-priced set of bias lights from Amazon claimed to be 6500K, but the LED's were not accurate at all! They looked green and blue! How do I know that your bias lights are any different?

All white LED's are driven by a an underlying blue diode (Please note, here in 2018, our MediaLight Pro is driven by a near-violet diode with no blue spike).   The diode directs photons at a blend of phosphors and those phosphors, in turn, glow white.  When the blend of high-quality phosphors is just right, you get the colour temperature that you need based on how the human eye sees colour. 

You can take a closer look at the spectral qualities of light by studying it under a spectroradiometer. A tell-tale sign of white LED lights is the blue spike above (all lights have their own characteristics - tungsten, fluorescent, sunlight, neon, etc).  While it looks like this would result in a blueish light, this is actually the spectrograph of one of our extremely accurate LED's.  The other colours are present in just the right balance to result in a 6500K colour temperature and CRI of 95+. Of course, the measurements were taken in a controlled laboratory setting and taken off of a neutral grey card as is necessary for an accurate and consistent reading.

Measurements of the MediaLight
on a Photo Research SpectraScan PR-650

You've gotta have standards.

Much of what we do isn't very hard or exciting, we're just very methodical about it, and this helps us to develop accurate products.  When potential suppliers sent us subpar components, they didn't make the cut. After literally hundreds of LEDs, we found suppliers who could deliver what we needed.  We developed best practices to avoid contamination and ensure that the premium LEDs we were buying remained true to their colour temperature even after they were mounted and assembled.