Govee sometimes reminds me of Taco Bell: cheap, decent, and almost everything it sells is just the rearranged ingredients of everything else it sells. And the Lightwall, which Govee just announced, very much feels like most of those things. Except for cheap. It’s $450.
The Lightwall is a 1,536-RGBIC LED array that’s hung from a rectangular frame and meant for outdoor use. Like the Govee Curtain Lights Pro, which is made up of 960 LEDs, it can show pixelated imagery and vibrant colors. From a distance, the Lightwall might make it look like you’re having an outdoor movie night—in fact, Govee highlights its “35 fps cinema-grade frame rate,” which it says gives the curtain “fluid and lag-free” effects.
The main difference between this and the Curtain Lights Pro, besides the Lightwall having quite a few more LEDs, seems to be portability. Govee says you can break down the Lightwall’s aluminum frame with no tools in around 10 to 15 minutes. The Curtain Lights Pro uses a pipe mount and isn’t freestanding; it also shows images at a slower 30 fps.
Also, while you can bring your own GIFs to display, the company offers a generative AI assistant in its app—the same one used for many of the company’s other products, like the Outdoor Lights Prism and upcoming Ceiling Light Ultra—that can create lighting effects and animations for you.
The app is also where you’d go to play around with the Lightwall’s 10 music modes, which attempt to synchronize the lights with music. The effect on products like this is never nearly as good as a programmed light show, but hey, it’s a cheap way to get moving lights going at a party.
The Lightwall is Matter-compatible, which means it’ll work with any of the major smart home ecosystems. But bear in mind that you won’t get any of the detailed control in Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, or Samsung SmartThings that you get from the Govee app. Matter doesn’t yet support individually controllable LEDs in light strips, so you’ll only really be able to tweak brightness and color, and turn the Lightwall on and off. Still, I think it’s nice to be able to add lights like this to existing automations, like those that turn all of my lights off at night, just in case I forgot to.
The Govee Lightwall is available to buy from Amazon and Govee’s website.
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