Light, mood, action in your studio and creative space

I’m a huge fan of Nanoleaf’s work in smart lighting for homes, studios, stages, and other creative spaces. I’ve tested their product lines, 4D lights, and a few others, but their latest line puts the rest to shame.

We’re talking about Nanoleaf’s Skylights, which are built tightly into your circuits and spit out a LOT of light (at least when you need it). Compared to Nanoleaf’s other lights, the Skylight is the biggest of them all, and I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few starter kits to light up my studio and see what mood they created and brought to my creative space and workflow.

So let’s quickly and easily break down what exactly the Nanoleaf Skylights are before we get into what I liked most about them and what might make potential customers hesitant, so you can decide once and for all if these are the right lights for your studio, entertainment center, content creation studio, or whatever else you 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 measures 12″ x 12″ and can display different colors and tunable white light. It 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 small to large spaces. The Skylight supports dynamic lighting effects and is compatible with major smart home platforms, including Apple Home, Alexa, and Google Home.

Designed to replicate a skylight, the Nanoleaf Skylight is intended to provide bright, versatile lighting with a contemporary aesthetic. Each panel can display over 16 million colors and users can create or select different dynamic scenes through the Nanoleaf app. Installation involves attaching the panels to the ceiling, which can be complex without professional help. Although the panels are bright and can create a wide range of lighting effects, their plain white plastic design can make them appear less attractive when turned off.

In terms of performance, the Nanoleaf Skylight offers high brightness levels, with each panel producing a whopping 1400 lumens. Overall, it’s an advanced, flexible lighting solution for those looking for an impressive, customizable ceiling light system.

Nanoleaf Skylight Review – The Benefits

They are a total mood

Nanoleaf lights are a staple in almost every room, and it’s no wonder that almost every content creator on YouTube that I follow has a Nanoleaf product in the background as part of their ambient lighting. And while I have the Lines and a few other Nanoleaf products installed in my room, the Skylight is like the Apex lighting installation compared to anything else in their lineup for a few reasons.

The most important reason is that these lights just look cool. With the ability to use static light colors or changing dynamic lighting, they add an incredibly cool atmosphere to any location they are used in. While I’ll get into the color schemes and presets in a separate section shortly, I do want to mention that I was impressed with how much control the skylights brought to the space over the atmosphere of my studio.

My studio is in the bonus room above the garage of my house, so there isn’t a lot of natural light. Being able to mimic the naturally bright and cloudy Oregon sky outside in my more or less enclosed studio is a great perk. On the other hand, at night I can switch the lighting to warm, yellow, firelight-style color schemes, which is great for the cozy creativity that I like to work and make music in.

They are incredibly bright (or incredibly not)

To follow up on my previous comment about my studio being somewhat isolated and without much natural light, there wasn’t much artificial light either, with only one hardwired fixture lighting my entire space. My workaround was to hook up a whole bunch of lamps and other lighting. But even then, these are great for creating the warm atmosphere I like to produce in, but they were lousy at lighting up the room when I needed to find a lost screw that had fallen off or a lost guitar pick that had gone missing, which felt more like looking for a needle in a haystack since the studio is so dimly lit and moody.

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

Being able to switch between this intense lighting and a more subdued mood lighting by quickly sliding the fader in the app is a game changer in how I work and my workflow.

It has a cool AI

I had a blast looking at the user-generated presets in the app’s free marketplace. When I learned about the AI ​​prompts that create color palettes and schemes that mimic and recreate the prompts, it opened a whole new world for me.

Here are some of my favorites that have produced pretty cool results and 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 disadvantages…

They are difficult to install

I’ll admit that this is a pretty big downside that I didn’t expect and haven’t even seen mentioned by many other people who have reviewed and commented on these lights. Installing these lights is not a one-person job like many other Nanoleaf lights, so if you’re already a huge fan of what Nanoleaf has been doing for years and even have a few pieces in your house that you’ve installed without help or another pair of hands, that’s not the case with the Skylight.

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

Add to that the fact that you have to install these lights into the house’s circuits, while most other Nanoleaf products can be plugged into a wall, and installing these things requires a fair amount of knowledge, expertise, and manpower.

They are a bit expensive

There’s not much to say on this point other than they cost a pretty penny so these lights might be out of reach for many of you. A starter kit of 3 is just under $250 and I imagine most of you will want to get at least two of these kits to get the maximum benefit 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 deals, so there are ways to avoid list price on these lights as long as you’re smart about your purchase.

Who is the Nanoleaf Skylight suitable for?

Music producers

I’m only starting with this one because I’m a music producer and these lights have been an absolute revolution in my studio.

They produce a ton of light, as I mentioned, and can create almost any mood and aesthetic that puts me in the right frame of mind to make music. The fact that you can save a ton of different presets in the app means that you can switch between different lighting and color schemes depending on the music you’re making, or just the general studio vibe of that session. I usually keep the lighting low and warm, and use the AI-created Dungeons Torches preset.

However, if I’m writing more melancholic music, I switch to a darker blue scheme, and if I’m looking for a more reflective mood, I switch to the Oregon Forest preset mentioned above.

Content Creator

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

Whether you’re creating YouTube videos or want to have a podcast, the room you create content in and the background you produce your content in are vital to the quality and overall mood of the video. Because these lights offer so much control and variety, you can create any mood you want in your studio, and the fact that they can produce so much light means that lighting issues will never be an issue with the content you create.

Film lovers

These lights are so cool for entertainment spaces and can help create a cool aesthetic in a cinema room. Naneloeaf Skylights, when coupled with some of their other products like their 4D lighting, could be a perfect double solution to light up an entertainment room for gaming and enjoying a movie or TV show on Netflix.

Familys

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

I think the cool thing about this is that the starter kits come with three panels each, one of which can be permanently attached to the lights, so if you buy two starter packs, you will have six panels. You can use five of them for the main room, studio, grave site, etc. and still have the remaining main panel to hang in a bathroom or bedroom to provide red and sleep-inducing light at bedtime.