Nanoleaf Garlands Are Worth It to Decorate Your Christmas Tree
Holiday lights are perhaps the best use of smart features, making it easy to turn lights on and off from inside or set a schedule. When you add smart features to LED lights, they turn your holiday lights into a magical machine that creates colors and movement that you can change with the touch of your fingers. If you’re looking for the easiest smart string light to control, Nanoleaf smart string lights are what you need.
High quality with high brightness and color range
I’ll admit, I’m already enamored with Nanoleaf’s products and have spent the fall in shade-induced bliss in my living room. Once I found out they had outdoor lights, it was an easy sell. At the moment, Nanoleaf produces only one holiday light – indoor and outdoor garlands . They are 65 feet long and are split into two strands that can reflect each other. They are all on a black wire and I think the ideal application is wrapped around a Christmas tree, just like their marketing suggests. They are waterproof, IP44 rated and suitable for both indoor and outdoor use.
These are small, durable LED lights that don’t feel cheap. Each flashlight has 250 lumens, which is important, and a beam angle of 130 degrees; There are about 250 lights on the rope. In other words, these lights demand to be seen. The LEDs are RGB, so they support about 16 million colors, including white, but don’t have the extended RBGWW palette that the Govee Permanent Lights Pro has.
Multiple connection methods
All Nanoleaf products support Matter, allowing them to be added to any Matter hub, but they also connect easily to the Nanoleaf app; you’ll want to do this anyway because all the molecular level controls are available there. Nanoleaf also uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi—you can control basic functions over Wi-Fi, but you need a Bluetooth connection to affect changes like colors.
Huge range of colors available
The Nanoleaf app really makes these lights stand out. It’s useful to compare them to the Govee Smart String Lights , which I also reviewed. The Nanoleaf app doesn’t give you every feature or tool in the world, but because it gives you just the right amount of power, exactly where you’d expect. In other words, with Nanoleaf you have a better chance of achieving the color and movement you want. Unfortunately, Nanoleaf only offers this type of outdoor lighting, but you can still get a lot done by lighting up your entire home with them.
Nanoleaf starts with two settings: color rendering and response to music. In the Nanoleaf app you can see the actual color bar that will be used, unlike the Govee app where they use words and expect you to guess the colors (with stunning inaccuracy). Apparently you can set the entire light string to one color, including a pretty decent white. While you can assign a maximum of six colors to your row as a base, the app will handle color shifts between them, creating truly gorgeous ombres and gradient color transitions. Light doesn’t have to have movement, but it can, and that movement can be sound-responsive or not, just like Govi’s light.
It’s easy to create your own color scenes.
You can edit any of the presets to change colors or movement, but you can also create your own from scratch. The Nanoleaf app makes this much easier: you tap the plus sign and either choose your own colors one by one or start with a huge list of color themes. Then you decide which movement you want to use. Nanoleaf does a great job of telling you how the movement works and allowing you to customize it.
These lights handle gradients very elegantly. In the app, the rainbow comes in six colors, but when you select that rainbow, the indicator lights clearly display millions of colors to achieve the desired color scheme, transitioning smoothly between colors. That’s why I think the best way to use these lights for trees is to see one color move up the tree.
But what I found even more attractive was the way Nanoleaf handles motion. The Nanoleaf app has about 10 motion options, ranging from shimmer to smooth and organic. Each one creates an incredibly elegant and advanced movement. “Fireworks” really impressed me because it captured exactly what a fire looks like. A single star may chase the string of light elsewhere. These tweaks can turn color scenes like red, green and white that might look a little plain into an impressive array.
Not very long Bluetooth range and no expandability.
Nanoleaf garlands have a few disadvantages. First, you can’t chain multiple lights together. Each of them must operate separately, which means connecting each string to a power source. This is also true for the Govi version of these lanterns. You can of course group these lights together and then assign the same scene to each of the lights, but in most applications you need to group the lights together. Secondly, Govee’s Bluetooth is stronger than Nanoleaf’s. While connectivity wasn’t an issue, I didn’t have the range that Govee offers so I often had to get closer to the light source.
Great for one time use like your tree.
Compared to Govee, I prefer the Nanoleaf app experience. It’s not even close – you’re much closer to quickly achieving the results you want with Nanoleaf. I prefer the overall look of the light bulbs, from the bulb to the wire. But since this is the only string light or outdoor lighting product that Nanoleaf offers, this limits it. For a small application like a Christmas tree I would choose Nanoleaf, but for a whole house Govee would have the edge. Govee is also cheaper in price, at $89 compared to $119 for Nanoleaf. Although it is more expensive than most string lights, it has much more to offer thanks to its smart functionality. Once the season is over, the light can be placed behind the sofa or mirror in the living room to add a little reactive glow while playing video games or playing music.