TheRazer Aether Monitor Light Baris a premium illumination solution for gamers. It offers bright, customizable light, a standard white desk light on the front, RGB lights on the back, and smart home integration. It may be overkill for most, but it is certainly among the most premium desk lights available.
Razer Aether Monitor Light Bar
The Razer Aether Monitor Light Bar is a superb illumination solution for gamers and smart home enthusiasts alike. It offers stellar brightness, vibrant RGB, helpful customization options, convenient routine programming, and smart home integration, but this premium monitor light bar comes at a hefty price.
Price and Availability
The Razer Aether Monitor Light Bar is available for $129.99 from Razer’s website and Best Buy. It additionally has anAmazon listing, but as of this writing, it was not yet available there.
Specifications
Razer Might Have the Most Premium Light Bar
Between its superb build quality, amazingly bright light, and a huge array of customization options, the Razer Aether is likely the most premium monitor light bar on the market. Its core features are its absurdly bright lights, breadth of customization, and smart home integration.
Starting with the lighting alone, 100% brightness on the front white desk light and rear RGB lights is simply too bright. I would much rather have more brightness than I need and the ability to scale down than an insufficient brightness level. My opinion of “too much brightness” also stems from my room and desk being bright and reflective, so those whose rooms and desks are darker colors may actually make full use of 100% brightness.
The device’s build is similarly premium. The bar is incredibly sturdy and can fully articulate along its hinge. Many light bars have a few preset angles, whereas this light can point at any angle within its range of motion. The monitor mount is also sturdy and stable, and it’s highly unlikely to fall or wobble once mounted. It also has a .25" thread for secure placement on tripods or other mounts.
As superb as the brightness and built quality are, its simple setup and incredible features set it apart further.
Setting Up the Aether Is Simple
First, to set up the Razer Aether Monitor Light Bar, download the Razer Gamer Room app (available onAndroidandiPhone). Then plug the light in and use the app to scan the QR code on the bottom of the light. As long as your phone is connected to Wi-Fi, you’ve finished the basic setup.
It took me longer to figure out the setup process than I’d like to admit, as the materials included in the package are a bit vague. I also had to Google where the QR code was located, which was on the inside of the mounting hinge. You also need to ensure that the port you plug the light into provides sufficient power; a USB hub connected to my computer didn’t work, but a wall outlet did.
However, with that knowledge, setup is incredibly quick. Once you pair the device, you may customize it further in the Gamer Room app.
The Gamer Room App Is Simple Yet Powerful
One unique feature of this monitor light bar is its high degree of programming options. It offers routines and choices within Razer’s Gamer Room app, which allows for a huge degree of customization. This ranges from simple yet precise setups to assigning multiple devices to different rooms in your house and inviting family members or roommates to form households for broader access to light programming.
The in-app controls for immediate light customization are incredibly useful. I was able to program the brightness and white balance of the main LED light specifically, and as a YouTube creator, I really care about these settings for any light I use. Even better customization applies to its rear RGB lights.
Razer’s RGB Remains Great
Razer is known for its RGB lighting on its accessories, and the Aether Monitor Light Bar is no different. The Gamer Room app allows for deep customization, with RGB modes including breathing, spectrum, a static color, or a wave. Each mode provides further customization options like speed, color, or color range.
For example, in my testing, I generally set the RGB light to wave mode at a slow speed using the full rainbow of color, though you may program it just to be a certain range of colors.
At max brightness, the RGB is incredibly radiant, and at all brightness levels, the colors are incredibly vibrant. As with other Razer products, this RGB comes at full force, which you may further enhance by connecting the light bar toRazer Synapse on your PCfor Chroma Studio to react to your games and music. That said, Gamer Room and smart home integration alone may make this worth it.
Routines and Smart Home Integration Expand Utility
Within the Gamer Room app, you may set routines for any connected lights. These can be at specified times or follow a circadian setting. Light routines may be overkill and unnecessary for a desk light, especially if your desk isn’t in your bedroom. That said, it’s hard to let go of these routines once you use them.
I tested this light over a couple of weeks and programmed a routine to help me wake up. This entailed boosting all lights to 100% brightness and using an obnoxiously fast RGB wave mode for 30 minutes, starting 10 minutes before my alarm. I similarly made the lights as dim as possible and used a solid RGB color when my bedtime approached.
I have a basic $30 desk lamp on my other monitor, and I’d never even considered how much utility routines on that might add. Many of us spend the majority of our time at our desks, so using this light to help enhance my routine by adding visual cues was surprisingly helpful.
In addition to in-app routines, Razer integrated the Aether Monitor Light Bar with smart home platforms like Matter, Google Home, and Alexa. Unfortunately, my Echo Dot stopped working shortly before receiving this light, but knowing the immense depth of customization and routines smart home devices offer, I can only imagine the customization users can employ when paired with other unrelated gadgets.
Control Redundancy Is Luxurious
While in-app controls and programming are nice and certainly more precise, the Aether Monitor Light Bar allows almost all the same customization on the hardware itself. The light includes capacitive touch inputs over several lit-up icons on the bar. These are brightness, color temperature, a customization slider, RGB cycling, and power from left to right.
Razer makes these customization options highly intuitive: select your setting and then adjust the customization slider to change it. This works on brightness, color temperature, and RGB brightness. Similarly, you can change the device’s mode by tapping the same RGB icon additional times.
Considering the primary way to customize this light bar is using the Gamer Room app, which requires a Wi-Fi connection, the additional redundancy in controls adds just an extra touch of luxury.
Should You Buy the Razer Aether Monitor Light Bar?
This is nearly a 10/10 product in a category people probably don’t think about or need. Most would suffice with a basic $30-40 monitor light bar. This device is completely overkill for those customers, but if you highly value customization, routines, smart home integration, extreme brightness, RGB, and convenient usage on a monitor light, theRazer Aether Monitor Light Barmay be perfect for you.
