I was recently sent the BenQ ScreenBar Lamp for Review. It’s a light for your desk. But unlike a lot of lights and lamps for your workspace, this has a number of features that make it great.

The lamp is designed to rest on top of your monitor shining light down in front of with, without reflecting off the surface of your monitor.

Inside the box you’ll find the light which is about 18 inches long. There’s also the bracket with counterweight attached that helps the light rest comfortably on a number of monitor sizes.

What’s great, is that it’s powered by USB, which means you don’t have to surrender another wall socket, and as a number of monitors have USB ports in them, it means you can stay on top of your cable management. The whole thing is very easy to set up.

Along the top, there are four touch buttons. One to power on the light, and next to that, auto dimmer mode. This makes use of an ambient light sensor to adjust the brightness and colour temperature of the lamp based on the lighting conditions of your room.

The next two buttons give you some manual control. One button adjusts the brightness from 15 different levels and the other button controls colour temperature through 8 different levels ranging from warm light, to cool light.

The design of the light means that it’s always angled where the light needs to be on your desk. Lighting across the workspace is completely even, and it really illuminates the space without seeming overbearing.

It had never occurred to be how much difference a good light can make. It actually feels a lot more comfortable working with this, especially given the number of customisation options.

In a time when the screens of your phones, tablets and laptops make use of auto-brightness and various iterations of night-shift modes, it seems to make perfect sense that desk lighting should do the same. It should be ‘smarter’ like the rest of our devices.

The ScreenBar, whilst not cheap, fits the bill perfectly and the light efficiency, customisation options and build quality of this light, means I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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