RGB lighting has exploded, with dozens of brands vying for the honour of bestowing your home with vibrant photons. Competition has proven great for making rainbow lights a more accessible dream for everyone, but it has also created a confusing landscape where every diode seems to have its own proprietary way of doing things, leading to frustrating inconsistencies, incompatibilities, and just some cheaply made lights. That's the way I felt about Govee, when I first had a look at one of Govee's offerings two years ago, the Dreamview G1 Pro, but now reviewing the brand's new Cob Strip Light Pro, it's clear these LEDs have had their glow up.
Govee's Cob Strip Light Pro comes in two lengths, 9.8 ft or 16.4 ft, and can be easily cut to shorter lengths. Though once it's cut, it's cut for good. You cannot extend it, which while sad, is fairly common for this breed of light.
The RGBIC+W style lighting is a step up from many standard RGB-only offerings. It allows for smooth fades between colours, and even some really pleasant white hues from a dedicated white diode. That's only a single white diode, however, and a lack of dedicated warm white in the mix means it is a bit more limited than options with more. Supposedly 1,260 LEDs are jammed all together and the colours are generally smooth, vibrant, and quite pleasant for the effort as advertised. This is packed into a flexible diffused unit with adhesive acrylic back for sticking it right up there.
Like most of Govee's new lights, this Cob Strip is Matter enabled, and it was fairly little effort to get it added to Google Home. I can do basic things like adjust the colour and brightness of the whole strip, and turn it on and off. This has been really handy, but if I want to do anything particularly fun with the lights, Govee's app is required.
I wouldn't call the Govee Home app straight up bad, but it is incredibly convoluted. There's menus on menus, social sections, a shop, and probably some stuff I haven't even found yet. While getting lights set up is fairly trivial in the app, sometimes finding settings can be a real trial. There are a lot of customisation options with scenes, music responsive options, and even AI assisted prompts. Some are easier to find, let alone understand, than others.
You can also make Dreamview scenes, if you can find the option, which allows you to sync several lights for a cohesive arrangement. This can also be teed up with Razer's app to work with more devices. There's plenty to play with, but It's not always easy to tell what any of these are going to do until you play around with them, and while you can edit them more control would make a huge difference.
The lights have their own mic, so when telling them to respond to sounds you can choose where they're getting that audio input from. This was perfect for my drum setup because all my music and sounds are coming through my headset and all the strip can hear is my hitting the drums. The lights respond to my physical bashings and looks super kinetic on stream. Dreamview even allowed me to create a cohesive scene between my drums and the curtain lights behind me. It's a really cool setup, but it's not exactly what I wanted.
The Cob Strip has 12 sections, which you can set the colours of individually. Thanks to the bright vibrant LEDs, this allows for some really pretty gradients and contrasts. What I can't do is create a scene that responds to music using those sections specifically. When I had it draped over my electric drum kit for YARG I was hoping to set each section up to correspond with the colour of the pad it was near, but just couldn't find a way.
✅ You're looking for bright ambient lighting: These lights are at their best when they're painting a room with colour and setting a vibe. They can vibe to music with their own mic or your phone's audio or just set a cool scene.
✅ You want off camera lighting: The colour and light that these strips throw is fairly impressive and can easily cover large areas to deliver a huge variety of evenly diffused looks. It even works well for keylighting so long as you're happy with the white's available.
✅ You're here for the features: In this package you've got a few metres of really versatile LEDs. As much as I moan about it, the Govee app, while difficult to navigate and fully understand, can be easy to use and lets you do a fair amount at the base level.
❌ You're looking for lighting you want directly visible in your streams or videos: These lights are really bright, and the downside to that is they blow out even on the dimmest settings. Your fun RGB effects will be wasted when they all look white on stream.
❌ You just want some LEDs: The Govee Cob Strip Light Pro is a fairly feature complete option but all those features push the price up. You can get far cheaper lighting setups if you're happy to forgo options like RGBIC, Matter, sound response, etc.
❌ You won't use the Govee App: You can do some basic stuff through Matter and the Govee desktop client but to get full value out of these lights you're going to need to download the app and probably spend some time confused.
At least the densely packed LEDs put out some bright light and Govee's Cob Strip is brighter and floppier than God's lightsaber. It's great for throwing light onto scenes and providing ambience tucked under desks, but less useful for being actively on camera.
Turning it even all the way down was still too much for my webcams, blowing them out consistently, despite my eyes having a mostly pleasant experience. Plus, my phone cam would pick up the slight movement of lights on the lower brightness settings. I'd often notice whatever the lights were shining on looked far more the correct colour than the lights themselves on cam. The diffusion does a lovely job of making things appear how you'd want in person, which is great for room ambience, but it doesn't seem to help that much for cameras.
When it comes to streaming or videos, facing the strips away from the camera and having them paint their surroundings with lights is where Govee's Cob Strip absolutely shines. The colours are vivid and nuanced, and the diffusion gives them an even hue. The whites, and even the fake warm white, are good enough to use as a key light, and with the strip you can get a super broad array on your desk space with the one light. If you can set it up right in your space, it's probably one of the better lighting options around for this purpose, thanks to that individual the segment control.
Govee's Cob Strip Light Pro is an incredibly bright and vibrant strip light you can do a whole lot with. It's not the best choice for being on camera, but when it comes to painting a scene with light the strength of the LEDs, coupled with the diffusion, make for a powerful array. The monkey's paw of an experience that is Govee's app mostly leans to the helpful side and there are a tonne of options there, too. You just want to know which kind of light you want before making your final decisions.
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