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Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them. The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is
by lawkwok 4y ago
Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them.
The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming.
Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room.
The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.
- marvin 4y agoI’ve tried out LIFX, and they’re pretty decent. But I’m unhappy with the spectrum of their deep, low-intensity reds. They don’t go far enough into the long-wavelength. I use this at night, before sleep. Ditto with their pure whites; haven’t measured the spectrum but feels like they don’t manage to approximate sunlight in color rendering. Granted, the bulb I have only goes between blue-white and red. Anyone been thinking similar thoughts and know of any options?
- tedmiston 4y agoI tried LIFX briefly a long time ago, but try a Hue color bulb. They go very red. (I use all Hue Color bulbs.)
- gregwebs 4y agoI bought Phillips Wix bulbs during Black Friday for much less than Hue bulbs. The Wix orange/yellow is underpowered but it works fine for us since we are using that at night anyways.
- herbst 4y ago+1 for Wiz. Way cheaper, good bulbs with nice colours. It's still less power usage and cheaper to just put up a second one instead of a brighter one. Also automation does work very well and doesn't depend on proprietary gateways or so.
- sumedh 4y agoHue lights are not bright, if you want bright lights/color look at Lifx lights and can be controlled by Wifi.
- pineconewarrior 4y agoHave LifX come back from the dead yet? They've been struggling super hard to get products back on the shelf and their support has been like, comatose, according to Reddit etc I really wanted to try their products because I hear the color bulbs are INSANE, but they were always out of stock, never on sale, and I heard so many horror stories...
- hammyhavoc 4y agoHad both LIFX and am now on Hue. The diffusion in the Hue stuff is on a whole other level, very easy on the eyes and aesthetically pleasing light produced. I don't think I'd go back. Automating with the brilliant open source Home Assistant.
- sumedh 4y agoNot sure what horror stories you have heard but supply is not too bad in Australia, I see them in stock in retail stores, I have had Lifx for a long time, still going strong.
- philliphaydon 4y agoI kick started lifx. Received 4 but had so many problems. They were crazy slow and didn’t change colour properly. I’m sure they have improved since then tho but I don’t have any use since I’m not in my own home.
- pineconewarrior 4y agoThis is the kind of thing I was talking about, exactly. I am not saying it's everyone's experience, but when you pay big coins for a fancy tech product these days like... support... please... And at this very moment the dang color bulb is sold out on their website.
- pineconewarrior 4y agoOh my gosh, after getting some I will never go back to normal lights. I was pretty vehemently anti-smart-stuff, before I experienced the benefit. The newer ones are pretty bright, too! I am really, really hoping that quality, adjustable lighting like this continues to come down in cost and continue to improve.
- smcleod 4y agoCompletely agree, fantastic lights and worth every penny, their CRI is high enough to fill out the visible light spectrum nicely - you don't get any "indoor greys" and they seem to last forever, several of my bulbs are over 10 years old and still working perfectly.
- haneul 4y agoI had a contrary response to the Hue. The color rendition felt dead compared to my typical lighting from Waveform.
- smcleod 4y agoDid you have the >90 or >80 CRI bulbs?
- haneul 4y agoThe white and color ambience bulbs, whatever CRI those are (2019).
- oxplot 4y agoAbsolutely. I have a bunch of waveform light strips (the highest CRI) which I use for specific lighting conditions (e.g. taking photos) and it's the difference between literally night and day. I'm also using them for plants and they love it! The only downside is their rather expensive cost so I'm yet to replace all my lighting with it, but it's a great investment given that it'll probably outlast me and so won't need to change them.
- Auracle 4y agoI put one up in my photo studio because I wanted some 6500k lights, and there’s no way it was actually white at 6500k. I forget what color it was tinged with but it was super obvious. I suspect they’re only high CRI at certain color temperatures?
- marvin 4y ago
- bubblethink 4y agoIs there any friendly alternative to these home automation things ? I would like to try some stuff but I don't want to spend a weekend creating vlans or fighting google play services, alexa etc.
- GuB-42 4y agoIn my local hardware store, they sell remote controlled light bulbs where you can change color temperature, RGB too. Of course you can find similar products online, including Amazon, AliExpress... Look for RGBWW. These exist as LED strips too. No apps, networking, or anything, nothing to configure, just IR remote control.
- herbst 4y agoWiz. They independently connect via WiFi and the API is pretty much public. I roll my own home automation system and can only recommend them because they just work.
- lynndotpy 4y agoI just want some lights that expose a simple API and are easy to talk to. I want smart lights that will work when the internet is down and doesn't need an app to connect to.
- herbst 4y agoWiz. Each bulb has a independent API available via WiFi.
- crispyambulance 4y agoThere's another problem with many these smart lights, IMHO. A lightbulb should be a long-lasting, easily replaceable thing. Putting in all sorts of doodads into the base of lightbulb just strikes me as wasteful and a recipe for a brittle configuration. It's bad enough putting in a power converter, now we're talking about RF transceivers, computers, webservers, and REST API's. All this packed into a tiny very hot space packed in with silicone goop and made, often times, by disinterested bottom-of-the-barrel manufacturers. It's much better, I think, to have the light bulbs be just that, LIGHTBULBS. Of course, they can be LED's, DC powered and have multiple colors but the control and power source should be in a box away from the lights, somewhere convenient. You can then put all the internet-of-things jazz into THAT BOX and not in each light. This would ultimately give interior designers a better palette of light sources to work with and give consumers a less annoying churn of bad choices for technology.
- foxes 4y agoDon’t you have windows?
- gernb 4y agoDo they require an app, registering an account, being online to use them? I don't want lights someone else controls and not going to pay for lights that report to someone else when they are on/off.
- tomjakubowski 4y agoNo internet connection required to use the bulbs. The bulbs connect to a hub over Zigbee, the hub connects to your LAN. Making that connection requires the Hue app, as far as I know. Once the bulbs are set up with the hub, you can control it on your network using HomeKit or open source equivalents, and don't need the Hue app for anything but firmware updates. This article convinced me taking the plunge would be reasonably safe, and I've been pleased with it. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/51910.html?thread=1921222 https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/51910.html?thread=1921222
- yx827ha 4y agoYou should check out https://sowilodesign.com/blogs/blog/how-to-use-bifrost-with-amplifiers-and-the-hue-lightstrip-plus-controller https://sowilodesign.com/blogs/blog/how-to-use-bifrost-with-... They offer a high current adapter for the Phillips Hue Light Strip so you can have large and bright light strip installations. Their LEDs are also top notch. I installed some as my pandemic lighting and it's been great.
- enw 4y agoI hate to say it but there's no better advertisement than this on Hacker News.
- brnt 4y agoSo, I'm a low light kinda person anyway. The best light are light turned off. I can't stand the amount of light some (many?) switch on at the earliest sign of evening, and I guard my stash of low power bulbs (finding ones under 3W is hard!) like it's my first born. Apart from the kitchen, my house has no bright white lights anywhere. What would the utility of smart bulbs for someone like me be?
- rashkov 4y agoMy last apartment had really inconveniently placed light switches. I bought some smart bulbs and found it really nice to control from my phone. For example I could turn on or off all the lights in my home without getting out of bed at night or in the morning. I also had wireless light switches that I could place on any part of the wall or just keep at my bedside.
- throwaway290 4y agoTry incandescent bulbs. They're hard to come by these days but they give the coziest vibe, couldn't be further from a hospital. As a bonus, full-spectrum blackbody radiation (unlike patchy spectrums of all LEDs) and no PWM.
- marvin 4y agoLove the contrarian tech take; go with the 1800s technology since it’s still superior in most of the ways that really matter ;) I think this view has a lot going for it.
- Claude_Shannon 4y agoYeah, but they are really expensive.
- lozenge 4y agoNot just expensive, but way overpriced, dim and anti-interoperable.
- sofixa 4y agoThere are more luminous models now, and i wonder why you say anti-interoperable? Their protocol is widely understood and spoken by a ton of alternatives to their Hub, so you can use them with whatever you want.