$200 is a lot but considering how much their regular light strip is it is not surprising. Hopefully they allow it to be used without just their hdmi sync box. Problem with that is it won’t work with hdmi 2.1 so I can watch movies with it but not new Xbox or PlayStation. If they did a camera like Goovee them that would be better
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Philips Hue Line Gains New Gradient Lightstrip, Revamped Hue Iris and More
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That would be nice, but can you imagine the price? Just look how expensive all their lights are.
I got the light bars pack for my TV and I absolutely love it. Yes I think $120 is kinda pricey but haven't had an issue with it for over a year now running nonstop. It really adds to the movie watching experience.
I love my Ambilight TV too and generally only consider Philips when buying a new one (even if Philips TVs really aren't the best option). This opens up the market for me, which is great news 
Govee branded led lights are freaking awesome. Seriously check them out on amazon. Their dreamcolor line is their newest edition and they rock. I have them all over my house and love them. I seriously do not know why anyone would overpay for these phillips hue lights...they are def a ripoff. And no, i don't work for Govee. I'm just a big fan of their affordable strips. Govee lights also don't require any hub and work perfect with Alexa if that's your assistant of choice.
People that think these kinds of things don't understand the benefits that a hub provides. Less WiFi devices on your network and increased reliability are a few I can think of immediately. I use to feel the same way and started to move away from hubs, but then my network got crowded and the devices became unreliable so I quickly shifted back towards hubs. YMMV
I don't the 30/40 € bridge is the problem considering the lights are pretty expensive
On the plus side:
- Hue basically works. Hue and Eve are pretty much the only IoT brands that are bulletproof. They just work, no matter what, no excuses.
On the minus side:
- the Hue app is hot garbage and tries REALLY hard on every possible occasion to fsck over and play badly with your HomeKit installation. Words cannot describe how much I hate everything about this app.
So where does this leave you?
If you can afford it, honestly, buy Hue and buy Eve. Yes, you can buy cheaper bulbs but after three months you will hate them. The Wyze bulbs are constantly flakey, on any given interaction with them there's about a 10% chance they won't respond. The Ikea bulbs are quite a bit more reliable, but insist on mapping their color temperature onto HomeKit in a way that makes very little sense.
Likewise the Hue smart plug (like the Eve smart plug) is bulletproof. Wemo, Wyze plugs -- utter garbage, will randomly lose connectivity once or twice a month.
The Hue motion detector is not exactly worth the cost if all you want is a motion detector (that's failry simple tech that even the most incompetent companies mostly can't screw up) BUT it's the one reliable sensor that comes with an adequate (not great, let's not get carried away) light sensor. You can use this to control lights coming on automatically in a way that works better than just time (or even sunset) based scheduling because it handles cloudy days well. (But Home.app makes doing this vastly more painful than it should be...)
The Hue smart button box is actually REALLY nice! Comes with 4 buttons, and is magnetic (so it sticks magically to my nightstand, which has iron in it). "Normal" configuration requires you to use the Hue app, and it only controls lights. You'd have to be insane to use that app. BUT you can use HomeBridge to bridge it into HomeKit as a generic 4-button controller and for that purpose it is awesome.
So yeah, it sucks that every idiot company on earth wants you to buy their own Zigbee hub, and has sucky non-generic apps. Look past that and Hue gives you reliability, and adequate HomeKit connectivity (easily augmented via HomeBridge for the button remote); and you can then do everything necessary in HomeKit (which is hardly great, but better than anything else).
As for this PARTICULAR issue: so you want cool lights behind your TV. Here are the options:
- buy a Phillips Ambilight TV. Not great if you like your current TV, or don't like any other aspect of the Phillips TV.
I don't understand why this feature hasn't already been copied by every other TV manufacturer, but right now the simplest solution.
- buy a Hue sync play box (~$300) and the Phillips LEDS (~$200). Probably the best quality, but expensive!
- if you just want to try the idea, see if you like it, a better choice is the govee LED strips kit (~$80)
The SW is not great (either the app software to set things up, or the firmware that translates the camera image into LED colors) and there is a (slight, but sometimes noticeable) delay so with fast action the LEDs lag the screen image.
If you use either of these solutions you will have to attach the LEDs to the back of the TV yourself. Conceptually it's not hard, but it may be difficult depending on how your TV is mounted, how heavy and large it is, etc -- think that through.
Personally I am happy with my Govee solution. It was cheap enough that was worth trying for fun, and my conclusion is I like the LED background color, and I like how it tracks the screen image -- but not enough to spend $500 and go through the hassle of pulling off my current LEDs and attaching new ones.
My ideal solution would be
- every TV company just builds colored LEDs in the back of the TV
- use them as a static color backdrop
- just pay the damn TV company an extra $100 so they can activate the sync with the screen image and pay Phillips whatever royalty they demand for whatever tenuous patent they have on the feature.
Let's see if we've moved to that by the time I need to buy a new TV.
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The Phillips Hub (and most hubs) have nothing to do with WiFi.
Hue bulbs use Zigbee. Many other devices also use Zigbee (eg Ikea).
Blink cameras use their own proprietary RF protocol.
You HAVE TO have something that can talk to the radio interface (Zigbee, Z-Wave, Blink) and then communicate with the rest of your network via ethernet or WiFi.
This is totally reasonable. Ideal solution would be if Apple put a Zigbee and Z-wave radio in HomePod or Apple TV, so they could do this job, but that hasn't happened. Maybe one day.
The secondary reason for the hub is to perform "always on" tasks, ie to run scripts and scheduling when the user's phone is not present. This is basically BS. It's companies assuming that they can do this job much better than an Apple, Google or Alexa hub (and being pretty much completely wrong about that). I hope it will go away soon as Apple, Google and Amazon allow better IoT device control via software running on their hubs.
The tertiary reason for the hub is to force you to buy one more box. This is, of course, total BS. But it's also tertiary. You CAN (if you want to go through huge pain) use eg the Phillips Hub to control your Ikea bulbs, or vice versa (both are Zigbee).
In an ideal world, one day all the radio protocols will live on one Apple/Google/Amazon box, that box will run IoT server software (a Hue server, an Ikea server, a Blink server) and no other hubs will be necessary. Getting there will take at least 10 more years :-(
None of this is new -- remember when networking started and you used different hardware (different actual connectors and wires!) from different companies? Then we mostly converged on ethernet hardware but were still running different low level protocols (SMB/NetBIOS, Novell, Appletalk, ...) Even after we all agreed on TCP/IP we ran different higher level protocols (I mean, even today you can use APFS on your mac, though SMB is the preferred file sharing protocol).
It just takes time for all the idiot companies with no business thinking they should be reinventing the entire software stack to give up and converge on standards.
Somehow i never understood why shall I have colored lights behind a TV, like in the article pics.
When I watch a movie over our tv or projector, I prefer to be in a complete darkness, like in the cinema.
But yeah people are different.
Try it and see! Just having SOME light there is actually rather nice!
Try getting some light behind the TV (ege just tape some LED strips to the wall!) to get a feel.
(BTW you can get basic [white only, non-smart, no control except on-off] LED strips at Ikea for something ridiculously low, like $5. Worth getting just to experiment.)
The next level up is matching the LED colors to the TV. This is cool in a "show your friends" way, but I think is less valuable that just having some light behind the TV so it isn't in complete darkness.
This is great. I've really been wanting the back of my TV to look like the undercarriage of some weenie kid's customized Nissan Cube.
I have the original Hue Iris with the hand held remote.
Brilliant device for setting colours, hue and brightness. Wish they made them compatible with the bridge.
Brilliant device for setting colours, hue and brightness. Wish they made them compatible with the bridge.
Tried this already at a friend of mine, didn't like it at all, found it too disturbing.
I know lights adds atmosphere to a room etc., but while watching a movie i prefer darkness, the movie itself shines enough for me.
Thank you, I saw v1 of that a couple of years ago at a friends house. I loved the app and all, but I found the colour palette of the lights to be quite cheap and electronic. More like an RGB gamer keyboard than the warmth of Hue bulbs. But it looks they’re claiming to have improved on that so maybe worth another look.
The commenter I was replying to implied that they would rather have devices with no hub, in other words, WiFi devices.
"I think the problem with Philips is that there are many alternatives that doesn't require a hub."
My comment was in response to that comment to remind them that hubs help keep WiFi traffic down. With Hue alone we would have 22 more devices on our already crowded WiFi network if we were using alternatives that do not require a hub.
That are crap. I prefer a hub honestly. My lifx stuff is garbage. Constantly have issues with my router(AmpliFi). My hue stuff is solid. Hell my ikea home stuff is solid too. Lutron is solid also. Why? becuase they have hubs. I don’t want a billion lights on my wifi network anyway
I have Hue setup myself along with the strips. But $199 for the light strip is somewhat out of the question. Since you need $199 for the light sync to work even.
Exactly! Ambilight is nothing like that and is in fact scientifically proven to reduce eye strain when watching television. I've had an Ambilight set for almost 15 years (I bought a Philips 32PF9830 in 2006 to watch the World Cup in HD!) and I don't really notice it anymore when watching at home (on a slightly newer 42PUS7809), but miss it immediately when watching another television.
Interesting idea. You can see how with the profusion of gratuitous LEDs on everything these days, people might be skeptical though. I use a projector myself, and adding any ambient light is generally bad for contrast with those.