[Jeff @ Mar 17th 2006 11:49AM]

"This is akin to putting those dopey neon lights under your car so you can go "cruising" and look "cool.""

Well, no, it isn't.

It's long been known that putting a backlight behind your set both reduces eyestrain and also, if you use the right *color* backlight, improves the perceived color accuracy of the set. You need a neutral grey background for this, though, which these sets *do* support but you just don't see it in the ads they make because it doesn't look very impressive.

There are several modes that these Ambilight sets have; you can have it try to match the backlight color of whatever you're watching on the fly (that's what they show in ads) or you can set it to any static color that the set supports (which is what you should do).

But it's not a useless technology. Maybe the background-matching feature is, but the technology itself isn't; it's based on real science. (Not that there's anything all that revolutionary about sticking a couple light bulbs on the back of a TV, but it's a good feature to have anyway and nobody else does it that I know of.)