I remember when I got sent my first “smart bulb” for review.
From some generic overseas knockoff company with a mediocre app.
It was a neat idea, but seemed more like a gimmick than a real product I’d spend money
on.
Fast forward a year or so and I’m reviewing a similar product concept, but for a much
higher price - and I’m surprisingly okay with that.
I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun today taking a look at Philips Hue.
Specifically the “Hue White and Color Starter Kit” with three bulbs, which is… almost
200 DOLLARS?!
Yes, you’re making a significant investment here, but you’re getting a really premium
kit.
In the kit, you get 3 bulbs - which are standard A19 size sockets, with a flat-ish profile
- and the Hue Hub.
The hub itself needs a wired ethernet connection to your wireless router or switch.
This was a problem for me, because my router is on the first floor with my main office
stuff, whereas I wanted to use my Hue bulbs upstairs in my studio and the connection just
wouldn’t stay.
The first night I set it up it worked great, but the next day bulbs kept not being detected
and so on.
Thankfully, I needed to set up a wifi extender in the studio anyway, so I just set up the
hub into that.
Still an annoyance that just one floor is enough to limit the connection.
The bulbs themselves actually help ping the connection between them, so in theory if I
had more Hue bulbs around my office or apartment, there wouldn’t be connection issues.
But that’s a lot more of an investment.
The app then runs on your smartphone and allows you to control the bulbs from anywhere - which
is nice.
The app is nice and gives you some solid options.
You can turn lights on and change their colors individually, or you can set up separate “rooms”
by grouping bulbs together and control them that way.
You can manually control the on-off status, color, brightness, etc. or you can set up
custom profiles.
There’s “recipes” which can emulate certain themes such as a sunrise, sunset,
etc. or specific white tones for tasks such as studying, waking up, and so on.
It goes further than that, though, and allows you to set up actions based on a scheduled
routine or location information, as well.
You can change the status, color, brightness and so on based on the time of day, or whether
your phone is detected as “coming home” or “leaving,” too.
What the app doesn’t let you do is set up custom profiles of color alternations.
Imagine your standard LED strips or mechanical keyboards with RGB lighting - you can set
up breathing, flickering, random colors, color wave, and so on.
You can’t really do that here.
No “Christmas Light” effects, sadly.
However, there are third-party apps available which can add additional actions to your Hue
setup.
Also, you can connect the Hue hubs to other smart devices - such as an Amazon Echo.
This is fairly straightforward and then you can control lights by voice.
Take that, clapper.
The color range of the Hue bulbs is quite nice, as is the range of white temperatures
available.
You can fine-tune these to run as video lights, too.
They get decently bright without getting hot.
I’ve been using these in my home studio for colored light for b-roll recently and
they’ve served me greatly - but there is a problem you might encounter when using these
for video.
Since these are digital LED lights, there is a refresh period to them that can be detected
at certain shutter speeds on a camera.
This can show up as lines, flickering, or pulsing of the light and can be quite distracting.
I’ve also found a couple forum posts referring to this as a potential cause of migraines
for some users, too.
I was able to mostly get rid of this by lowering my shutter speed to 1/50 and shooting at 24
FPS, but sometimes it still shows up.
You might have to power cycle your camera a couple times to see if it can sync up.
Honestly, my biggest problem with the Philips Hue system is the price of the kits. $200
for 3 light bulbs is a tough pill to swallow, regardless of features.
Then upgrading becomes a question of financial fortitude.
I had finally worked myself up to buying a white kit for my office lighting just so I
can have the scheduler run on them, and the Amazon page was a tad misleading and I ended
up with nasty yellow color temperature and returned them immediately.
I’d love to switch my full office to these, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
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Overall, the Philips Hue kit is pretty awesome.
The features and quality available here are quite satisfying, but you have to be willing
to shed out a pretty penny for them.
For budget colored lighting for studio productions or a cool party scene, this is still one of
the more cheaper solutions however.
I hope you enjoyed my review of the Philips Hue colored starter kit.
If you did, smash the like button, get subscribed, and consider buying with one of my affiliate
links in the description down below.
I’m EposVox, and I’ll catch you in the next one.