About 130 years after the invention of the incandescent lamp, Philips launched its successor in 2012: the Hue lamp. This smart LED lamp can change brightness and color in an instant – 16 million colors, to be precise. By the way, almost all light bulbs that you buy today are sustainable LED lamps (LED stands for light-emitting diode).
They are more expensive to buy than the incandescent and energy-saving lamps that some of us know from the past, but they also last ten to twenty years. The smart bulbs, including the 250 different models included in it Philips Hue-gamma sit also work on LED technology. In addition, they have an important addition: a built-in antenna with which they can connect to your wireless network. So they can be operated remotely.
–
These are the possibilities of a smart lamp:
• You can switch on one or more lamps at the same time from a distance.
• They fit in standing, hanging or other lamps.
• The intensity can be adjusted to the atmosphere you want to create (think of ‘studying’, ‘movie time’ or ‘dinner’).
• Thanks to geofencing the Hue lights can be set to turn on just before you get home.
• They can be integrated into one smart homesystem, as they also work with platforms such as Zigbee and IFTTT.
–
The main drawback? Even after eight years on the shelves, they are still on the expensive side. For a Philips Hue-lamp you pay 20 to 30 euros; many times the price of an ordinary, non-programmable LED bulb. There are already numerous smart competitors on the market, from brands such as Woox, Innr en Xiaomi. Still, Hue remains the global market leader with, according to some market research, 50 percent of the total market share.
Just under a quarter of all smart bulbs sold worldwide are in stores Ikea: of Wirelesslamps are no-nonsense products, which offer less frills in terms of functions than the Hue lamps, but can just as easily be networked. Their price – half to a third of an average Hue – is also a convincing argument.
Signify, the Dutch company behind Philips Hue, now understands that there is a lot of competition at the ‘bottom’ of the market and last year WiZ over, one of the new and more affordable brands. It has a retail price that is in line with that of Trådfri and the other competitors. In addition, they can also be found in a wider network of shopping points, such as at Albert Heijn, for example. Although the WiZ bulbs are from the same manufacturer as Hue, they cannot work with it.
–
Watch our trending news videos in the playlist below:
–
