Govee TV Backlight 3 Pro Review

Design

• Well-made camera apparatus and LED strips
• Neat and concealable control hub box
• Light strips awkward for certain TV designs

Because of the slightly unwieldy architecture of any TV backlight system, quite a lot of stuff arrives in the Govee box. Along with a delightfully uninformative quick start guide, you get a user manual, palm-sized 16-bit colour-processing control box, power adaptor, hinged three-camera arm (designed to lock centrally onto the top side of the display), orange foam pads for calibration (more on that later), the all-important sticky light strips themselves on a spool, and hook hardware for cable management and extra load bearing.

Govee also provides a couple of alcohol-soaked pads to clean down the rear TV surfaces to which you intend to stick the 3M-taped light strips. The first job is to attach the LED lights vertically and horizontally onto all four outer dimensions behind your display.

As you probably find with the quirky design of your own telly, my 65-inch TCL C845 has a somewhat hefty protrusion for the fan assemblies and a not altogether straightforward stand mount. Consequently, getting nice clean perpendicular lines a couple of inches in from the perimeters was challenging in places. I didn’t need the extra hooks for cable management, but they are useful for the rubber strip light connecting cords if the Govee ends up as a permanent fixture in your home.

When the camera arm and hinge are mounted to the topside bezel, it resembles a picture-illuminating light, although it shouldn’t mask any of the screen from normal viewing angles. Both the camera and light strip connect to the black control box via USB-C which, in turn, plugs into a wall socket via the power adaptor. All in all, the Govee’s packaging and individual components are well-presented and brandish a high-quality build standard.

Features

• HDR enhancement for colour grading and shadow detail retrieval
• Letterbox override to ‘ignore’ black bars
• 30fps content capture

After you’ve made all the connections and found an appropriate place for the control box (you can stick it to the rear side of your display, for example), it’s time to download the Govee app. Between it and the included user manual, the setup feels unnecessarily convoluted and drawn out (more on this later). Initially, you will need to identify your product, pair with Bluetooth and then Wi-Fi (2.4Ghz band only). Both the latter exercises took several attempts with associated warnings, but I got there in the end.

Govee then requires you to stick orange foam pads to the screen of your FPD, so the cameras can calibrate themselves and map the geometry of the TV surface. I decided not to do this as I didn’t want to contend with cleanly removing gooey patches from my screen, however safe the procedure might be. Using the app, you can still finger drag the movable pointers to their correct positions using the on-screen lattice diagram.

You can then dig in with setting up the white balance and colour saturation using the app controls and on-screen test patterns. Govee requires you to search YouTube to find its own channel and the corresponding video to perform these tasks (or you can download one from a USB stick).

However, the company has produced more than one explainer and/or marketing video on the subject and it is not obvious which they intend you to use. Having identified the one I believed to be the correct resource, the workflow instructions went by at a ridiculously unreadable speed. I performed the calibration ritual in a dark room, as recommended, but it’s important to remove extraneous light sources or shiny surfaces nearby which can inhibit accurate results.

Despite my gripes with the somewhat overcrowded app interface and setup routine, Govee offers nice tweaks for HDR adjustments, known as HDR Effect, along with customisation for viewing states, such as Solid, Vivid, Smooth and Delicate.

You can also flip between Game and Movie modes, and I must assume that many TV Backlight 3 Pro customers will be of the former persuasion. I’m not sure I could perceive much difference between the four HDR settings, nor the four brightness settings. Subtle as they may be, there’s plenty to play with when you come to optimising your space.

Also note that you get an adjustable blank screen setting for shutting down the light strips over prolonged low-brightness conditions or inactivity. Govee also allows you to toggle on a black bar setting (for widescreen 2.4:1 material, for example), so that only the colours from within the letterboxed dimensions will trigger a reaction from the lighting system.

Performance

• Excellent colour matching
• Perceived enhanced black levels and contrast
• Responsive app operation

There are some wow moments when striking up the Govee. As part of the calibration procedure, the test screen reveals a spinning colour wheel hurling every possible hue out beyond the confines of the display. It hadn’t required that much tweaking in the app to get the colours to mirror their on-screen counterparts.

Of particular note is the accuracy of subtractive colours, such as teales, cyans and magentas, all of which seem to glow in their intensity and accuracy and lend a sense of immersion and scale to the presentation.

For all of Govee’s efforts to mitigate the effect, though, there is a noticeable time lag between a colour or effect rendering on screen and its counterpart on the rear wall. It can be mildly distracting and it’s worth bearing in mind. Time lag is not a downside associated with HDMI sync box systems as the processing is usually handled in a few milliseconds per frame and not the longer 35ms of the Govee.

Being a movie guy, and not a gamer (sorry), I try out the Govee with a few Blu-ray selections, starting with The Adventures of Tintin (2011). I’d already picked up on the backlight’s competency with animated content on YouTube, which appeared to be agreeably synchronised.

The Bagghar bike chase is an obvious place to start with its quick cuts and swirling virtual camera dynamics. As Govee promises, both the on-screen colour saturation and detail extraction are enhanced by the system. Earth tones from the ground and electric blue skies rapidly flood the backwall, but the moment the red Land Rover lands in the foreground, it’s reflected in the behind-display colour mapping.

As for the assertion that the view becomes more relaxing on the eyes, that is certainly true as well. I find that my eyes are drawn into the action more when viewing with the Govee. Edge details and colour stability appear more honed, but remember it’s simply an illusion created by the backlight array. It even embellishes lower-key dramas when spinning up the 4K UHD disc of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The movie’s extraordinary blue-tinted colour palette marries well with the 3 Pro’s light dispersion.

While I can see the appeal of a backlight system, they’re not for me personally. LEDs (or light-emitting diodes) create cooler luminosity characteristics that make me uncomfortable. If there was an incandescent equivalent, I could be more easily persuaded to sign up.

Should you buy it?