Sylvania is next up as the other Zigbee smart light strip being tested today. The price is certainly steep, at $80 for an 80”, but if you’re looking to build out a larger ecosystem of smart lighting, Hue isn’t a bad choice, but it will cost you. The ecosystem surrounding Hue is enormous and can’t be ignored, between the software capabilities and the hardware accessories, it’s unmatched. A lot of smart lights will default to “on” which isn’t great if it happens in the middle of the night.Įven though it can only show one color at at time, the Hue light strip can be sync’d with your TV screen or monitor using Hue Play. Within the app you can set the “power on state” which allows you to decide how the light strip will behave when the power goes out. It’s quite intuitive to use and you also have some basic automation controls available. The app itself is quite full-fledged, and if you wanted to you could do everything from there. If you have the bridge, then it will use Zigbee as the connection which is quite reliable and won’t cause any issues with your WiFi. But if you want to experience the full feature set then you will need to get the Hue bridge.

The newest Hue lights trips have bluetooth so you don’t necessarily need a bridge to make it work. This is probably where it could improve the most.Ĭompatibility is great, as it works every every device. It actually gets impressively orange when set to the lowest setting.Ĭolor accuracy is pretty good as well, though there are some questions in regards to purples and pinks and how it differentiates them. White accuracy is pretty good at both the cool and warm temperatures. It has a brightness rating of 1600 lumens which is quite bright.

It’s gotten a few updates over the years, but remains at the same $80 price point.

The Philips Hue Lightstrip has been around for so long that it’s almost ubiquitous with smart lighting.

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