Hp Omen has worked hard to bring the features we have always been waiting for – Dynamic Lighting in Omen devices! Thanks to Omen Gaming Hub and Light Studio.
HP Omen 15 2018 model is my primary laptop device. So as soon as they released Omen Gaming Hub with Light Studio, I put my hands on the software, reviewed and used it for more than 2 weeks now.
It’s a pleasure for me to be one of the first, if not first, on the internet to cover the review for HP Omen Gaming Hub & Lighting Studio.
Store Link:
Let’s begin the show!
OMEN GAMING HUB:
INTERFACE
The Interface is pretty cool. It gives overview of the capability of the HP OMEN GAMING HUB. Most people would love it (I don’t know who won’t :p).
FEATURES
My Games
This tab shows the games you have installed on your system. Omen Gaming Hub was able to recognize few games like Rage 2 and Counter Strike Global Offensive earlier. I don’t know why it is not being shown anymore, so I manually added Homefront and Hitman 1 to his tab.
I hadn’t been using the Game Time feature in HP Omen Gaming Hub, so it’s “A Little Empty!”. This tab would help you to track down your game time to showoff to the community.
Light Studio
Clicking this opens Omen Light Studio. Keep on reading to know more about it, I would be covering it as well.
Gallery
This is a recently added feature. Gallery.
It allows you to download and set some cool Omen wallpapers as your Desktop Wallpaper. Small but really nice addition.
Coaching
I don’t use this feature but this would help you to track down your gaming skills per different genre and improve your competitive gaming skills.
Check their official site for more info.
Remote Play
Omen 15 Laptop
System Vitals shows CPU, GPU, Memory Utilizaton as well as your Download and Upload Speed. Pretty useful for very gamer and power users.
This Network Booster tab allows you to priortize your bandwidth to allocate to any specific app (or games!) for faster connection and fewer lags.
This interface lets you proceed with Basic lighting or Dynamic Lighting. Basic lighting allows you to set individual lighting to the 4 zones in HP Omen 15 laptops.
You can adjust your fan-temperture controls here. Omen app page shows you could undervolt your CPU as well, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in my model.
But worry not, I would be covering HP Omen thermal fix in another article!
OMEN LIGHT STUDIO (beta):
HP Omen Light Studio. It’s exciting!
Also you could pair it with other Omen accessories and sync everything up!
INTERFACE
This is Omen Light Studio Interface. It allows to set simultaneous effects together with the concept of layering. Keep on reading to understand the effects.
EFFECTS
Let me be very honest and straight forward with you. If you are expecting “Perfect” effects transition and all those highly finished effects, then would might be little dissapointed.
HP Omen Light Studio offers some pretty solid good effects, but since it is in BETA, the actual effects aren’t very perfect outside. They seem little not-so-smooth-flowing-light.
But Something is better than Nothing! HP may take time but they would keep on updating the software to make it Finished. Just have patience. I had almost lost hope that HP Omen 15 would ever get dynamic lighting. Waited almost 2.5 years! But here it is!
Since the Omen software is in BETA and not very smooth, I am not going to give physical overview of each effects. But they work mostly as they should.
Static
Very Standard Effect. Sets one colour for complete keyboard.
Ambient
This show very dim ambient colours based on display’s colour output.
Audio Visualizer
Shows cool visualizer when you play any sound or music. Waveform is better than Power bar!
Blinking
Wasn’t very pleasing. Blinks light – on and off and looks weird.
Breathing
After some tweaks, shows breathing effect to keyboard (light fadiing in and out).
Color Cycle
Slow smooth colour transition based on selected colour sets.
Image
Allows to set keyboard zones lights based on the image your provided. Maybe 0.001% users would use this.
Wave
Creates wave pattern your keyboard by utilizing all 4 zones. Little not-so-smooth effect. I found setting degree between 300-315 and speed between 8-12 best combo of all effects.
Interactive
Currently this isn’t supported in Omen 15 laptops. It would display effects from the key you pressed in.
Additions
What innovative HP Omen has done is that it allows you to pair any number of effects by allowing you to create layers and define effects on that layer by selecting zones. Since transparent colours can also be used in effects, they all combine to give you much more advance controls to your keyboard.
CONCLUSION
The effects are amazing. It was a long wait seriously but they are significant upgrade to the current static RGB keyboard. I highly recommend that to anyone who owns the HP Omen models with muti-zone RGB Keyboards to check it out when available to you and expect better fine tuning of effects from HP.
I hope you enjoyed reading the review. Please share it with your friends because they are gonna be excited too.
To address the thermal furnance issue on your Omen laptop, check this useful post. Signficant temperature difference!
