Quick note: some links here are affiliate links — if you buy through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I bought both of these light bars with my own money, purely to compare them, and every opinion here is my own — which, as you’re about to see, no sane brand would pay for.
Monitor light bars exist to solve a deeply boring problem: lighting your desk without a lamp hogging the surface or bouncing glare off your screen. Two of them landed on my desk — the BenQ ScreenBar Halo 2, the premium favorite at around $199, and the Quntis RGB Pro+, the budget upstart at about a third of that.
So the BenQ costs roughly three times as much. The only question that matters is whether it’s three times the light bar. That’s why I bought both and ran them head-to-head on the same desk, at the same settings, with a lux meter and everything.
I’ll spare you the suspense: one of them now lives in a drawer, and it isn’t the expensive one.
This is The Test Bench, so the rule holds — I actually used both of these on a real desk, measured everything myself, and nobody paid me a cent to love one and bury the other.
The contenders
In the premium corner: the BenQ ScreenBar Halo 2. A front light plus a rear bias light, a wireless dial controller that sits on your desk, auto-dimming, and asymmetric optics designed to light the desk without throwing glare back at your eyes.
In the budget corner: the Quntis RGB Pro+. A front light plus an RGB backlight, a puck-style remote, and a price around a third of BenQ’s. On paper, it even one-ups the BenQ with RGB lighting, and its box claims it’s brighter than the BenQ. On paper.
How I tested
Both bars clamped onto the same 34-inch monitor, one at a time. Same brightness (100%), same color temperature where the hardware allowed (4500K), same desk, same spot. I laid a lux meter flat on the desk in the identical position under each one, to measure the light actually landing where you work. And I lived with each long enough to form a real opinion rather than an unboxing reflex — which matters, because one of these makes a lovely first impression and the other makes you squint.
Round 1 — Light quality and coverage
The entire job of a light bar is to light your desk. The BenQ does it beautifully: a wide, even, clean pool of light with no ugly hotspots, in a color that reads like daylight rather than a hospital corridor. It’s the sort of light you stop noticing within a day, which is about the highest compliment desk lighting can earn.
The Quntis does not. Even with the blinds shut, it barely lights the desk. The pool is thin and feeble, and you catch yourself glancing up to check whether it’s even switched on. For a product whose sole purpose is illumination, “Wait, is this thing on?” isn’t the review it wants.
Round 2 — The brightness showdown
Here’s where opinion turns into numbers. Same spot, both cranked to maximum, lux meter on the desk. The BenQ delivered around 538 lux — and since BenQ claims 500, it actually beat its own spec. The Quntis managed around 40 lux. That is not a typo. Forty. Same spot, full brightness.
That’s roughly a tenth of the light. And here’s the part that stings: the Quntis box boasts being the brighter bar, with a rating of nearly 900 lux. On my desk, at maximum, it produced less than a twentieth of that. It is, quite literally, brighter on the box than on the desk.
Round 3 — Controls
The BenQ hands you a wireless dial that sits on the desk. One finger glides brightness and color temperature up and down, with a live readout telling you exactly where you are — 4500K, 74%, whatever you fancy. It’s genuinely nice to use.
The Quntis gives you three brightness settings. Not adjustable brightness — three. Brightish, dimmer, and off, with nothing in between and no way to tune the warmth at all. And to change even those, you don’t tap a button on your desk. You pick up the whole control unit, cradle it in one hand, and force a stiff outer ring around it with your other hand, like you’re winding a pocket watch from 1890. Every single time.
Round 4 — The backlight
Both bars glow onto the wall behind your monitor. The BenQ’s rear light is a warm, adjustable bias glow that’s genuinely restful in a dark room. The Quntis answers with RGB — the one thing it does that the BenQ doesn’t — and it’s pure novelty: weak, gimmicky color that adds precisely nothing to getting work done. Worse, you can’t turn it off. You can cycle through the RGB colors, but I could find no way to simply switch the rear light off. So the single feature the Quntis has over the BenQ is one you’d want to disable — and can’t.
Round 5 — Build, cable, and extras
Credit where it’s due, and there is some. The Quntis clip is decent — it gripped my monitor securely, with no wobble — and I noticed no flicker at all, which budget lighting often can’t claim. So it’s not a complete shutout.
But the details stack up against it. The bar clicks onto its mount and runs off a single USB-C-to-USB cable so short that it only just reaches under my desk to my PC, and a computer is your only power option. The BenQ, meanwhile, ships with a longer cable and a choice of connections: run it to your PC, or straight to a wall outlet. It also includes a stick-on adapter that puts your webcam back on top of the bar, because light bars push it off-center, and the BenQ simply hands you the fix in the box. The Quntis includes nothing of the sort.
BenQ vs Quntis: the full scorecard
Every round, side by side. Green is the winner of that row; grey is a tie.
How they scored
Same criteria, rated out of 10 — BenQ in green, Quntis in red.
The verdict
So, is the BenQ worth three times the price? On this evidence, yes, emphatically, and by a wider margin than the price gap suggests. It’s brighter (measured, not claimed), the light is better, the controls are in a different league, and it solves the webcam problem the entire category creates. The Quntis isn’t a disaster in every respect — the clip is fine, it doesn’t flicker — but it flunks the one job you buy a light bar to do: put good light on your desk. A tenth of the brightness, three blunt settings, a controller you wind like an heirloom, and a party-trick backlight you can’t switch off.
I bought both with my own money so you wouldn’t have to. Buy the BenQ.
The one to buy: BenQ ScreenBar Halo 2
~$199 · the light bar that actually lights your desk
Who should buy which
Frequently asked questions
Is the BenQ ScreenBar Halo 2 worth the money?
Yes. Measured on my own desk, it beat its own brightness claim; the light quality and controls are excellent, and it includes a webcam adapter that fixes the one problem light bars create. For real desk work, the premium is justified.
Is the Quntis RGB Pro+ any good?
It’s cheap, the clip is solid, and it doesn’t flicker. But it’s dramatically dim — I measured roughly a tenth of the BenQ’s light — with only three brightness settings, no fine warmth control, and a fiddly controller. As desk lighting, it underdelivers.
How much brighter is the BenQ than the Quntis?
On my desk, at the same spot with both at maximum, the BenQ measured around 538 lux and the Quntis around 40 — roughly thirteen times more light. The Quntis also fell far short of its own near-900-lux claim.
Do monitor light bars block your webcam?
They sit where a top-mounted webcam usually goes, so yes, they push it off-center. The BenQ includes a stick-on adapter so your webcam sits on top of the bar; the Quntis doesn’t.
Can you turn off the Quntis backlight?
Not that I could find. You can cycle through the RGB colors, but there’s no option to switch the rear light off entirely — only the front light is properly independent.
What do you power them from?
The Quntis connects to a computer via a single (and fairly short) USB-C-to-USB cable. The BenQ is more flexible, with a longer cable and the choice of USB or a wall outlet.
