This is a practically perfect Christmas tree.
Pros:
- Incredibly easy to put together. This replaced a nearly 20 year old tree that we loved, but required individual branch assembly and fluffing stringing the lights. 2 hours reduced to 5 minutes.
- The white lights are essentially perfect. The exact color temperature I want, I'd guess somewhere around 3000K. DC powered, so no flicker that I can see. Sealed rice lights, too, so it's very unlikely to be damaged.
- Needed no fluffing, even right out of the box.
- The twinkle setting is great. Almost no LED rice lights have this particular twinkle setting, in my experience.
- LOTS of lights. This thing is BRIGHT. Before you decorate, you will think it's too bright. But once you get all the decorations on it, it has the perfect glow.
- Remote is a nice touch, but we have a smart power strip, so don't really use it. In any other case, it would be awesome to have this little remote.
- Materials are good quality, and the tree isn't too wide or narrow. I consider this the perfect shape for a 9' Christmas tree, and fits in our space really well. YMMV, obviously.
Cons:
- The colored lights are bad, but most LED colored lights are. We don't use them, and I don't recommend that you do either. It's a cool party trick to use the remote to switch them to colored, but otherwise you'll want to switch them back to white.
- All the effects besides the twinkle are useless. It's cool that they're there, but I can't imagine a scenario where anyone would want to use them permanently. Go with either steady-on or twinkle and you'll be happy.
- The white lights are the perfect color temperature, but boy are they hard to match with other LED rice/cluster lights. These lights remind me of the light from a brand new incandescent light set, which makes my other LED cluster lights look an artificial orange right next to them. I'll have to be on the lookout for good cluster lights that match this color, because it's perfect.
- I'm not sure how I'm gonna store this tree yet. It's too big for one box, even the one it came in, since they had to bind/compress it to get it to fit initially, and I'm not going to do that at the end of the season. I'm going to try to fit it into 2 of the 40gal totes and see if that works.
- It's pre-lit. Sure, the lights will probably last a lot longer than the first generations of pre-lit trees, but if the light string breaks at some point, I can't see myself taking the time to remove them. There are just SO MANY lights on this tree. But I guess all trees are pre-lit these days, so this is probably the best of the pre-lit world right now.
- I think that $600 for a Christmas tree is kid of ridiculous. But I'm cheap, so maybe this is exactly the right price. If this tree lasts as long as I think it will, though, I guess it'll be worth it.