Philips Hue Lights to Get New Brightness Balancer Feature and Additional Automation Controls

[MallardDuck]

Given how awful the HK UI is for lights, yeah, you probably are.

The Hue app is far from perfect, but it's so much better than HK.

Ditto - I use iConnecthue for most of the things (the replace bulb wizard in there is SO helpful), and the hue app to setup the scenes I want Siri to be able to set, then sync to homekit. I *never* use the homekit UI for anything if at all possible (it's probably the worst UX of any apple product in memory).

 

[svish]

Very good changes for Hue lights.

 

[canonical]

I personally have no issues with the hue bulbs colour accuracy, and when I pick warm white it's very far from a cold white, it's a very warm yellow hue not that far off halogen. It's about time halogen and incandescent died out permanently, they use a ridiculous amount of power usage and a ridiculous amount of unnecessary heat.

The white ambiance bulbs can go from very cold to very warm, same for the colour ones so getting the temperature you want isn't that hard.

Well, that's a bit like saying it's about time Apple's monitors died out, because they are ridiculously expensive compared to the competition, irrespective of whether their colour accuracy is better than the alternative cheapo units. The colour accuracy of LED's is appalling: the best ones have CRI indexes of 90 (compared to 100% accuracy for incandescent and halogen). And most are worse than that. That is why so many LED lights make the rooms they are in have that dreadful washed out look. The heat given out by halogens and incandescent can actually be an advantage in cold climates or winter, acting as a very efficient distributed heat mechanism that is far more effective than radiant heating from point sources. Not so good for summer or hot environments, of course. It all depends whether colour accuracy matters to you: some people still listen to lossy MP3s or even lower quality streaming, because they don't know better, or can't hear the difference, or consider hi-res music to be waste of bandwidth/money/energy.

 

[sniffies]

I must be the only one who uses the Hue app only to pull bulbs and accessories into HomeKit.

Nope, not the only one. It’s the only reason I use the Hue app. I can’t stand the ugliness of third-party apps. No one can match Apple’s polish and aesthetics.