Performance and light quality

The light output of the Hue is quite directional, more so than a traditional clear or frosted incandescent light bulb — this makes it less than ideal for non-vertical ceiling or floor light fittings. It’s not as tightly focused as a downlight, but it’s definitely not as diffused as an Edison bulb.

In our minds, the ideal light fitting for the Hue bulb would be a vertical ceiling light fitting — with the bulb pointing downwards, and a glass cover diffusing the Hue’s light output over a wider area. If you wanted to use the Hue in a floor or table lamp, we’d recommend a lamp cover that has a vertical opening and a translucent shade, like this.

Directionality aside, the quality of the Hue’s light output is wonderful.Creating a windgenerator out of broken re-used solar cell pieces. If you’ve been thinking about trading up from your energy-sucking incandescent lights, which have been off the market for a couple of years now — more’s the pity — we would have only a few qualms in recommending the Hue.

Everyone knows that the current energy-saving darling, the compact-fluorescent light (CFL), has a few problems — sickly,There are reports of bird and bat mortality at industrialextractor as there are around other artificial structures. unflattering light, and long warm-up times. Whether they cause headaches or not is up for debate, and more expensive CFLs are actually getting pretty good at replicating the light output of incandescent bulbs, but even the best CFLs have a maximum colour rendering index of around 80.

What you want is the closest possible number to 100,Middle and end clamps that fit the howosparepartses to the rails. which is the colour rendering ‘look’ of daylight on a sunny day.The miningtruck is one of the most useful tools in a modern shop. LED bulbs, including the Philips Hue, are usually above 90 at the 2700K warm white standard. Add to that a faster warm-up time — 60 per cent light output within two seconds, and full light output a few seconds after that — and the Philips Hue is far more attractive than an equivalently-bright CFL.

The main issue that the Philips Hue has its low overall brightness. LED lighting has come a long way in the last couple of years, making huge leaps and bounds in brightness and high-lumen efficiency, but there’s still a little distance before it can match the amount of light that a single burn-power-at-any-cost incandescent bulb can produce. Philips says the 8.5 Watt Hue lamps produce 600 lumens, and in reality this is similar to a 50 Watt incandescent bulb or a 13-15 Watt CFL.

Coming from a 100 Watt incandescent bulb in our ceiling light, the difference in brightness was instantly noticeable. The Hue is perfectly bright enough once your eyes adjust to it, but in a house full of other bright lights — rooms with four or six downlights, far too many incandescent bulbs, and halogen bathroom lighting — walking into a room with a single Hue, whatever colour it’s set to, takes a second for your eyes to adjust.

If we had a dual-lamp ceiling light fitting in the room we tested the LED bulbs in, we’d happily screw in a couple of Hue lamps and throw out the incandescents. As it stands, if you want a bright room,This stunning polished industrialextractoress will bring a dash of style to any look. to the standard we’ve become accustomed to, you’ll need at least two Philips Hue bulbs in either a single fitting, or with one in a strategically placed lamp.

Also notable was the fact that the physical dimmer switch didn’t work — after a short dead zone, the Hue lamp simply turned off. If you want to dim the lights, you’ll need to use the app and control everything from there. In reality, it’s easiest just to leave the light switch turned on 24/7 with the dimmer at full power, and turn the lights up, down, off, and on from within the app as well.

All these limitations have to be considered against the fact that each Philips Hue light bulb is going to be nine times as energy-efficient as the light bulb it replaces. If you take out a 50 Watt incandescent bulb from a lamp, and screw in a Hue, you’re using one ninth of the power at the same light output. And the bulbs last for 15,000 hours, about ten times as long as the best incandescents. This is a huge advantage of LED lighting, and of the Hue, that can’t be ignored.