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Hue LED Bulbs Are Your Own Personal Light Show

7th Nov 2012

It used to be that lighting your home was pretty simple (and pretty basic).  Go to your local department or hardware store, grab a few of their incandescent bulbs off of the shelf and bring them home. Screw them in at home or at the office, turn on the lights switch and voila, light! Easy and quick, this was the standard for a very long time. Today there are more and more options available to light your home in ever more interesting ways and, with a new system developed by Philips, you now have a lighting system that will conform to your mood with color whenever you like.  Think about it like a mood-ring for your bedroom or kitchen. The new bulbs come with an app that lets you take advantage of their 11 LEDs per bulb and their three basic colors.  Philips calls them royal blue, red / orange and lime which dutifully replace the boring old blue, red and green of old.  With the app you can actually create 16 million different color combinations, enough that you could have a different color in your bedroom every day for almost 44,000 years! They even allow you to get the light color that started it all, traditional incandescent! Not only does the included app let you mix and match colors to fit any mood or any color scheme in your home it will also let you program the lights to change colors at a given frequency, turn on and off when you’d like and fade in and out.  If you want to wake up to bright orange and fall asleep to soft blue you can. Adjusting the new lights can be done in several ways but the most interesting is by simply moving your mobile phone with the app up and down.  Very cool, although there is a second or 2 lag time between movements and light changes. The new bulbs will fit in most traditional light sockets although they are not recommended for the type of lamp where the lamp shade sits directly on top of the bulb, mainly because the top of the new bulbs are a bit different than the older incandescent bulbs you’re used to. The best part; the new bulbs are energy efficient and only use 8.5 watts at full power. The drawback for most is that they are pricy.  Three bulbs and the hub to run them is $200.00 and they’re only available through the Apple store. Still, they are said to last 15 years which means that you’ll be seeing the (colored) light for a lot longer.