I’ve said this before, openly and without shame I’ll say it again, with technology I am as vain as it comes. While my colleagues are chasing pure power in products, my first go to question is, does it look good? Then, does it match the rest of my set up? Back-lighting is the ultimate accessory when it comes to gaming/office set ups, a guilty pleasure, if you will. Now while I am vain, I am also lazy, and have always been deterred from stuffing around with meters of messy, LED lights, introducing, the Nanoleaf Canvas Lighting. Coined as smarter by design, how do these wall mounted lights fair up for illuminating your entertainment spaces?

Coming straight out the box, you are given 9 silky, square light panels, one being the master, a power cable, linkers and a whole lot of sticky pads. The cable is quite lengthy which is fabulous to see as it gives you so many options for your placements around the room and easily hidden, making for a clean set up. The panels come with at least four different linker locations too, meaning for multiple tiling pattern options, giving you creative capabilities beyond your wildest dreams.

The master control panel has 6 main buttons, each mapped to a unique setting. On the main panel you will find an On/Off switch, brightness adjusters, colour selection, shuffle scene and lastly, a rhythmic scene changer. You can cycle through a vast array of hundreds of unique solid colours and shuffle a wide variety of rearranging moving patterns such as warm reading lights or create a firework of rainbows. My favourite feature though, was the button that enables you to sync real time music and sounds to pulsating patterns that dance across the canvas of panels in time to your favorite artists. Believe me, I often used this feature to pound out pumping light-shows to deep bass in the background of my streams and gaming sessions. Also, surprisingly, on solid white they are bright enough to illuminate a whole room, even suitable enough to be used as a light ring on camera.

The jewel in the Nanoleaf Canvas is in fact the accompanying app you can download. While, it isn’t a must as there is multiple pre-set schemes on the control panel, it expands this piece of tech into a near innovative world. Being quite the creative soul myself, by simply downloading the app available in the Google Play and Apple store, this is where you really turn it up to a hundred in the advancement of your customization. This easily navigable app is simple and clean, easy to understand and clear in directive of what needs to be done, once synced to the canvas which I aptly named ‘Lighty McBlinkyface’, it is clear how very user friendly it is.

The app allows for fine tuning, with the ability to calibrate the panels to tweak colour saturation and brightness. It has an amazing scheduling ability, that I was skeptical about at first, but was amazed when I witnessed for myself my lights illuminating the room at scheduled times with the scenes I had selected.

This is also where you can download firmware to keep it all up to date and running smooth, build a library of extra designs created by users across the world or branch out, mess around and create your own sequences. I live for this collaborative direction of sharing designs, downloading many from starry night styles to Cyberpunk futuristic movements to cascading Autumn leaves like colours, I found a design to suit any mood. It also allows for interactive games, that utilize the touch sensitivity, oh yes, that’s right, we also have touch enabled options too, but not just the standard running your hand over the tiles to change colours but more original concepts such as Memory or my favorite game, Wack-A-Mole.

Almost deserving its own review, in its own right, Nanoleaf kindly supplied MKAU with the quirky Nanoleaf Remote. Uniquely designed in a dodecahedron shape, this device can be used to control your canvas lighting arrangements. Using the app you can map out each side to your own scene, flipping it to a certain side to get a desired effect, and changing it to something else with as simple as another turn. Making your life even easier you can even map an On and Off side. My mind was blown when all it took was then turning this 3D shape left or right to dim or adjust brightness.

Now, while this innovative and inventive remote blew me away, as an Android user I did have some trouble getting it to sync and update using the firmware, but I got there in the end.
Nanoleaf is nothing but about customer service as their website and YouTube channel is full of helpful tips and design ideas to inspire you along your ultimate lighting journey.

My only critique of this incredible hardware is the fact the sticky pads used to attach it to the wall, despite all my efforts, peeled my paint. Not fun for a rental, but there are many mounting options available, so it was my bad.

Overall, this is one product I highly recommend for elevating any set up to that next level appearance. I certainly can not wait for Nanoleaf’s Australian store to go live, as this is one gamer who is certainly going to buy more panels to let her creative juices run wild. If you want a product that isn’t just lighting but a whole new imaginative experience, then this should be your first stop!

Written by: Stacey