I’ve been a massive fan of Nanoleaf’s work in smart lighting for homes, studios, stages, and other creative spaces. While I’ve tested out their lines, 4D lights, and a couple others, their latest product drop puts the rest of these to shame.

We’re talking about Nanoleaf’s Skylights, which are hardwired into your circuitry and spit out a TON of light (if you need it to, at least). Compared to the other lights from Nanoleaf, the Skylight is the biggest of all kahunas, and I was lucky enough to get my hands on a couple of started kits to light up my studio and see how much of a vibe they created and brought into my creative space and to my workflow.

So let’s do a quick, cut, and dry breakdown of what exactly the Nanoleaf skylights are before diving into what I loved most about them and also some things that might give potential customers a bit of hesitation so that you can decide, once and for all, whether these are the lights you need for your studio, entertainment center, content creation studio, or whatever else you may need.

What Is The Nanoleaf Skylight?

The Nanoleaf Skylight is a modular smart ceiling light system that brings customizable, tunable white and full-color lighting to your home. Each panel, measuring 12” x 12” and capable of displaying different colors and tunable white light, connects via 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. The system is expandable, allowing users to start with a three-panel kit and add up to 99 additional panels. This flexibility makes it suitable for lighting anything from a small room to a large space. The Skylight supports dynamic lighting effects and compatibility with major smart home platforms, including Apple Home, Alexa, and Google Home.

Designed to simulate a skylight, the Nanoleaf Skylight aims to provide bright, versatile lighting with a contemporary aesthetic. Each panel can display over 16 million colors, and users can create or select from various dynamic scenes through the Nanoleaf app. The installation involves connecting panels to the ceiling, which can be complex without professional assistance. While the panels are bright and capable of producing a wide range of lighting effects, they can appear less attractive when turned off due to their plain white plastic design.

In terms of performance, the Nanoleaf Skylight delivers high brightness levels, with each panel producing a whopping 1400 lumens. Overall, it is an advanced, flexible lighting solution for those seeking an impactful, customizable ceiling light system.

Nanoleaf Skylight Review – The Pros

They Are A Total Vibe

Nanoleaf lights are always a set piece in almost any room, and it’s no wonder why almost every content creator on YouTube I follow has a Nanoleaf product in the background as part of their ambient lighting. And while I’ve got the Lines and some other Nanoleaf products installed in my room, the Skylight is like the apex lighting installation compared to everything else in their range of products for several reasons.

The main one is that these lights are simply cool-looking. With the ability to have static lighting colors or shifting dynamic lighting, they add an incredibly cool ambiance to wherever they’re applied. While I will dive into the color schemes and presets in their own section here shortly, I want to mention that I was impressed by just how much control over the vibe of my studio the skylights brought to the space.

My studio is set up in the bonus room above the garage in my house, so there isn’t much natural light. Having the option to mimic the naturally bright and overcast Oregon sky outside in my more or less contained studio is a great perk. On the flip side, I can switch the lights to warm, yellow, firelight-style color schemes at night, which is great for that cozy creativity that I like to work and make music in.

They Are Incredibly Bright (Or Incredibly Not)

Following up on my previous comment about my studio being a little isolated and without much natural light, it also didn’t have much unnatural light either, with just one hardwired lighting fixture to light up my entire room. My workaround was having a fair amount of lamps and other lighting plugged in. But even then, those are great for creating the warm vibe I like producing in but SUCKED at lighting up the room when I needed to find a lost screw that fell or a guitar pick that went missing, which felt more like finding a needle in a haystack cause of how dimly lit and vibey the studio is.

But the Nanoleaf Skylights can spit out a massive amount of lumens, and the ten panels that I have hardwired into the old light fixture easily, and for lack of a better term, aggressively, which makes it easy to find lost items in the room, deep clean gear, rearrange synth cords and cables, and more.

The option to toggle between this aggressive amount of lighting and low mood lighting, all with a quick slide of the app’s fader, is a complete game changer in my work and workflow.

It’s Got AI That’s Cool

I had a blast looking through user-generated presets on the app’s free marketplace. Whole new doors were opened when I learned about the AI prompts, which create color palettes and schemes that mimic and recreate whatever the prompts were.

Here are some of my favorites that yielded pretty cool results that I use as my main color schemes when working, producing, and just hanging out in the studio.

Oregon Forest

Dark Dungeon Torches

Oregon Beach

The Cons…

They Are Hard To Install

I will admit that this is a pretty big con that I did not see coming and that I haven’t seen even a lot of other people reviewing and commenting on these lights remark upon. Installing these lights is not a one-person job that many other Nanoleaf lights are, so if you’re already a massive fan of what Nanoleaf has been doing for years and even have a couple of pieces in your house that you’ve installed without the need of assistance or another set of hands, this is not the case with the Skylight.

You will need at least one if not two, extra people to help you install and screw in these panels.

Add to this the fact that you need to hardware these lights into the house’s circuitry, where most other Nanoleaf products can plug into a wall, and installing these things requires a fair amount of knowledge, expertise, and manpower.

They’re A Little Expensive

There isn’t much to say on this point outside of the fact that they cost a pretty penny, enough to where it might put these lights out of reach for a wide swath of you. A 3-pack starter kit will cost just under $250, and I imagine most of you would want at least two of these kits to get the maximum amount of value from these lights and feel like you have enough of them installed.

Luckily, Nanoleaf offers student discounts, first-time customer discounts, and some great Black Friday sales, so there are ways to avoid paying sticker prices for these lights as long as you’re savvy about how and when you purchase them.

Who Is The Nanoleaf Skylight For?

Music Producers

I’m leading off with this one only because I am a music producer, and these lights have been an absolute game-changer in my studio.

They crank out a ton of light, which I mentioned before, and can create almost any vibe and aesthetic that gets me in the mood to create music. The fact that you can store a ton of different presets on the app means that you can toggle different lighting and color schemes depending on the music you’re making or just the overall studio vibe of that session. I usually keep the lighting low and warm, using the Dungeons Torches preset the AI created.

Still, if I’m writing more melancholy music, I’ll switch to a darker blue scheme, and if I’m looking for a more contemplative vibe, I switch to the Oregon Forest preset I mentioned above.

Content Creators

Nowadays, even more than rock stars or music producers, everyone wants to be a content creator.

Whether you want to create YouTube videos or have a podcast, the space you’re making content in and the background in which you’re producing your content is vital to the video’s quality and vibe overall. Because these lights offer so much control and variety, you can create whatever mood in your studio you want, and the fact that it can produce so much light means that lighting issues will never be a problem in the content you’re making.

Movie Lovers

These lights are so cool for entertainment rooms and can help create cool aesthetics in a movie room. Naneloeaf Skylights, coupled with some of their other products like their 4D lighting, could be a perfect 1-2 punch for lighting up an entertainment room for gaming and enjoying a movie or TV show on Netflix.

Families

To wrap this up, I’m also a dad, and my wife and I are always looking for alternative lighting for our baby’s room and the bathroom, so I remove as much blue light as possible to help my toddler fall and stay asleep.

What is cool about this, I found, is that the starter kits have three panels each, one of which can be hardwired into the fixtures. So if you buy two starter packs, you’ll have six panels. You can use five of those for the main room, studio, interment center, etc., and still have the remaining hub panel to hang up in a bathroom or bedroom for that red and sleep-inducing lighting around bedtime.

The post Nanoleaf Skylight Review: Lights, Vibe, Action In Your Studio And Creative Space appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.