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One of the bigger trends in desks, which I was late to the party on, was the idea of a monitor light. This style of light clamps to the top of your monitor, has a bar/strip of lights, which are designed to shine downwards in front of your monitor. I suspect that the reason for these existing, is that the overall size increase of monitors the last several years, as meant that there’s often very little space left on a desk for a more traditional desk lamp.

Which is why I ended up buying the BenQ ScreenBar Pro. BenQ invented this category of lights with the ScreenBar line back in 2017, fast forward to today and they have a bevy of options — and a wide range of randomly named competitors on Amazon to boot.

But, I went with BenQ, because of all the lights available, they seem to be the only ones with a very specific focus on the quality of the light they are outputting. And that is speaking my language.

This light bar is, without caveat, exceptional.

Specs

Alright, let’s dive into the specs on this:

• Over 500lx at max
  • over 1,000lx around your keyboard mouse area
  • 500lx outside that
  • Max general area it spills to is 45” x 23”
• 8 section reflector
• 24° adjustment to ensure light does not hit eyes, with 18° cut off angle
• Light is designed to not spill on to display
• Ra greater than 95

Those specs slightly downplay what is actually happening with this light. BenQ has very clearly spent significant time designing (and patenting) this light to really nail this use. There’s three things I think BenQ has clearly focused on with the ScreenBar line (and the Pro specifically):

1. Color Rendering. Typically you won’t see this mentioned outside of “high CRI”. I’ve really hammered on this when talking about light bulbs and flashlights. But a typical lightbulb from the hardware store likely has a CRI of 70ish. A low-end higher CRI bulb is around 80. The Sun at high noon is 100 (perfect score!). An actually good CRI is 90, and really good is 95, and if you can get above 95 then you are getting into a special zone. This light being 95, is telling, as that’s not a simple feat, especially with a light that can color temperature shift (which is mixing warm and cool temp LEDs for this light bar). The only thing leaving me for want with this light bar, is for BenQ to specifically state the R9 value, which is the rendering on reds, the most difficult metric for LEDs.
2. BenQ spends an absurd level of time talking about how they have refracted the light so that it shines downwards, and spills outwards from the monitor. They effectively keep the screen in the shadow, with no light spill on it, while shooting the light out, without the light hitting your eyes directly. That is, simply put, fucking impressive light engineering.
3. I have my complaints about the light sensor, but the actual design of it is interesting. ANSI specifies 500 lx as the optimal working light amount which will reduce eye strain during extended use, thus the sensor is adjusting the light to make the level 500 lx. All to often we measure light in lumens, but that’s only because it is easier to measure lumens (lm) than it is to measure lux (lx). The fact that they measure lux, as does the light sensor — well these guys are fucking serious about their light.

tl;dr: Impressive.

In Use

As I mentioned above, I was running out of space on my desk for a desk lamp to fit on the desk neatly, and also provide good lighting. I got curious about the ScreenBars and dug in. The Pro model is the middle-ground model from BenQ, with the Halo model offering and additional light to illuminate behind the monitor, and a little remote controller to fine tune it all. With my monitor in front of a window, and my desk space at a premium, both of those upgrades were downsides for me.

I’ve been using the ScreenBar Pro for several months now, and it’s simply fantastic. First, let’s talk through how it mounts, and the potential downsides:

• BenQ has a really cleverly designed clamp (which was recently redesigned, and is what I have) which can easily clamp the light on to just about any monitor shape/size. There’s a tiny lip at the front, and a large angled arm to secure the light. Even with the controls being touch controls on the bar, I’ve yet to have the light fall off, or move out of position. It’s really good.
• I have heard that on some monitors with integrated camera systems, this can block them. BenQ calls shenanigans on this, but it largely seems limited to Apple’s Studio Displays. While I’ve not tested that, there’s some very simple solutions all over Reddit, however, this could be a potential problem if you have a monitor with cameras. The front lip on the bar is very small, impressively so.
• One big downside is that this sits right where you might mount your camera for video calls. Luckily BenQ will sell you a mount that sits on top of the light bar, so you can use both the ScreenBar and a camera. I’ve not tried this, but I will say that because of the design, the camera would end up being comically high in the air, and thus looking down on me if I were to do this. Less than ideal, and likely the largest overall downside to this type of light.

I found that, even thought those seem like they could be quite the trade offs, they are practically a non-issue in practice. Next, let’s go over what it’s like using the light, and isn’t it annoying to reach up to control it all the time:

• The light itself is simple, and powered via USB-C cable (which I power off my monitor).
• There’s two main adjustments: color temperature, and brightness. Eight levels of temperature, and 16 levels of brightness to control them.
• The touch buttons work nicely, and if anything require a little more firm of a touch that you might expect for the press to register.
• While you can turn the light on and off, and the adjust the controls, BenQ offers three additional modes which greatly streamline the use of the light.
• The first is “Presence” which turns the light on and off to the last used model (manual, favorite, automatic) based on whether you are sitting in front of the screen or not. There’s a little sensor on the bar which can detect your presence. If you are gone long enough, the light turns off. Effectively making the light set and forget. It’s a really nice touch on this light and works exceptionally well.
• The next mode is favorite, which allows you to ‘save’ one light setting to it.
• The last mode is automatic, which reads the lighting in the room and adjusts the brightness to match. I have found that this mode is often too bright in dim light, and too dim in bright light — I think it’s the correct way to setup a mode like this, but it runs contrary to how I would set it up. This mode really needs automatic color temperature adjustment as well, but alas it does not have it.

How my keyboard generally looks, no hot spots of light.

I angled the camera to get as much of the hot spot as I could.

Alright, let’s talk through what I thought for sure would be the biggest issue: glare. It seems unfathomable to me that you can mount a bar at the top of a monitor like this, and not experience some degree of glare. But, this light is so well designed, there’s no glare. There’s no glare on my screen, and there’s no bright light shining in my eyes (and it’s above eye level for me). It’s astounding that this is the case, and a testament to how much thought and engineering went into this.

I was also quite worried about the quality of the light, but again I was proven wrong there, as the overall quality is excellent. Good rendering, and no dead spots visually on my desk.

At my desk this light stays set on presence mode at all times. When I leave my desk for the day, I switch the mode to my favorite, which sets the light to the dimmest and warmest, levels. Thus, when I walk into my office at 5am to grab stuff and the light turns on, it’s not blinding or overly cool in temp — it’s inviting and useful. When I start my day, I move the light to automatic and don’t pay it another thought.

I wouldn’t go back on any of this. This is a really nice bit of kit, and a well thought through and designed product.

Overall

There are many competitors, but this one has so very clearly been designed to be so perfect,, that I can’t imagine what you lose with others. It has solved my desk lamp issue, it looks great, and I have no regrets.

Buy here, $139.

Since I am in a safe space here, I will openly admit that the Snow Peak Aurora Bottle was a ‘grail’ water bottle for me. There’s absolutely no justifiable reason for me to go buy a $150 water bottle, which I will use on a trail and will likely drop a few times over the life of it, when I have dozens of other water holding bottles. There’s no reason for this. And yet, if you happen to hold one of these, you’ll get why people spend the money on this.

Luckily, I didn’t spend my money on this, my wife spent our money on it, and gifted me the world’s best water bottle in the process.

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Note: this item was provided for review.

I have a hierarchy I keep in my head for the overall difficulty for making different types of backpacks, from easiest to hardest, the categories are: military, hiking, hunting, travel, edc, office. Every time a company tries to tackle an office backpack, they run the risk of making something completely absurd, ugly, and generally useless. To couple that then with travel, well that’s asking for criticism.

So when Pioneer Carry asked if I wanted to test out their Savant Pack — which is for office and travel — I had a very low bar of expectation for this pack. It’s not often a company does this well.

With the Savant Pack, Pioneer Carry has a gem on their hands, being led by the materials, and followed by the smart simplicity of the bag. This is good stuff.

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There’s no Filson product more iconic to their brand than their Mackinaw Wool Cruiser an item Filson patented in 1914. One of the bigger regrets I have was a trip to Filson back in 2013 or so. I went to the old Filson flagship in Seattle (4th Ave) to get a Filson wool jacket with my first large bonus. I walked out with a lovely charcoal ‘Wool Weekender’ made in Mackinaw wool, which I wore for years (until I lost weight and it was too large), but I always had this thought that I should have bought the Mackinaw Wool Cruiser instead.

Thankfully, this was rectified recently, and now that I can once again wear heavy wool jackets we need to talk about this icon. Because there’s a damned good reason Filson has been making this for so long: it’s beyond good.

I knew what the material would be like, but I had no idea it would be this good to wear throughout the winter and even in snow.

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Note: These straps were provided for review.

As you might suspect, I am exceedingly picky with watch straps. I don’t even want to take a guess at how much money I’ve spent on watch straps only to later sell them for pennies on the dollar, or tossed in the garbage. I have found a couple of companies who make outstanding watch straps, and I have left my buying to only those. So when RSM reached out to offer some straps for review, I was worried.

I loathe getting a review sample that I hate and watch straps are hard to gauge from website descriptions alone, but the email was very friendly and it seemed like it was from someone who really got watches. And they offered that if I told them my favorite watches, they would pick the straps for me. I was game, a few weeks later a bunch of straps showed up, and a few hours after that I realized that this is yet another strap maker who gets it.

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