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Philips Hue Lux Starter Kit Review

editors choice horizontal
4.0
Excellent
By Alex Colon
August 25, 2014

The Bottom Line

The Philips Hue Lux Starter Kit is a great introduction to the world of connected lighting, offering a white-only counterpart to the original Hue bulb for half the price.

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Pros

  • Less expensive than Philips Hue bulbs.
  • Simple setup and wireless control.
  • Support for Alarms, Geofencing, and Timers.

Cons

  • Still expensive.
  • White light only.

We liked the original Philips Hue Connected Bulb ($199.99 at Verizon)  enough to give it our Editors' Choice award. In fact, we liked it so much that there is only a single Con listed at the top of the review: Very expensive. Philips has addressed this complaint with its new Hue Lux bulb. Lux offers almost the same exact functionality as Hue, but sells for half the price. What's the difference? Color. Lux bulbs are white-only, as opposed to the virtually limitless color palette offered by Hue. Still, for $99.95, the Hue Lux Starter Kit is a great introduction to connected lighting for the digital home. And because you can use connect both Hue and Lux bulbs as part of the same setup, the Lux Kit joins the Hue to earn our Editors' Choice award for smart bulbs.

Lux vs. Hue and Pricing
Hue Lux bulbs ($143.99 at Amazon)  have an A19 form factor and are virtually identical to the original Hue bulbs. They're conical in shape, with a glass end and tapered aluminum body that terminates in a standard screw base. The bulbs are rated for up to 25,000 hours of use, which is nearly double that of Hue bulbs. And Philips claims that each Lux bulb uses 80 percent less power than a traditional light bulb (which is also true for Hue).

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The primary difference between the two bulbs is that the Lux only offers a single color temperature. It's the same shade as a traditional incandescent bulb, which is slightly off-white. The Lux is a 750-lumen bulb, which is roughly equal to a 60 watt traditional bulb. That's more than the 600 lumens offered by the original Hue, so it's technically brighter when set to maximum. That said, the Lux offers a softer, mellower shade of white than the Hue does when set to pure white, so in practice both bulbs can feel equally bright.

The Lux Starter Kit comes with two bulbs and a wireless bridge. The bridge is required if you want to connect to the lights with your mobile device, which is the really the whole point of the system in the first place. You can add up to 50 bulbs to a single bridge, so most households will probably need only one. Luckily, Hue and Lux bulbs can be seamlessly connected to the same bridge.

Additional Lux bulbs cost $29.95 each, which is pretty expensive for a single light bulb (even a connected one), but a lot easier to swallow than $59.95 for a Hue. Because you can mix and match bulbs on a single bridge, you can save money by placing Hue bulbs wherever you want to be able to change the color of your lighting, and installing Lux bulbs everywhere else.

Setup
Setting up Lux bulbs is no different that setting up Hue bulbs, which is a good thing, as the process is extremely simple, with nearly no networking knowledge required. First you must screw in a bulb and turn it on; it'll light up without being connected, just like a standard bulb. Then you have to plug in the wireless bridge and connect it to a free port on your Wi-Fi router using an included Ethernet cable.

Once plugged in, you must then download the free Hue app to your Android or iOS phone or tablet (the app works on any devices running Android 2.3 or later, or iOS 6.0 or later), and follow the step-by-step instructions for pairing the bulbs and bridge with your device. The whole setup process only takes a few minutes.

Once you've gone through the initial setup, adding additional bulbs is incredibly easy. All you have to do is screw them in and search for additional lights through the app.

Lux inline

App Control
To control the Lux bulbs wirelessly, you must leave your power switches turned on. You can still turn Hue bulbs on or off using your regular light switch, but you won't be able to adjust brightness.

As mentioned earlier, the Lux bulbs share a nearly identical set of features with the original Hue bulbs. Using the Hue app, you can control the brightness of each bulb, as well as set alarms and timers. The alarms and timers performed flawlessly in my tests, and adjusting brightness is nearly instantaneous, something I didn't experience when using the Lutron Caseta Wireless Plug-In Dimmer Kit ($59.99 at Amazon) . The Lux bulbs also support geofencing, so you can set your lights to turn on or off automatically depending on where you are, which is a great way to make sure you turn off all the lights when you leave the house.

The Lux bulbs also work with a number of apps produced by third-party developers using the Hue Open API. On top of that, there are a number of IFTTT (If This Then That) recipes that incorporate Hue and Lux bulbs, which is a feature you won't find on many other connected bulbs on the market.

You can't use the Lux bulbs as part of a preset Light Recipe, though, as those recipes require a tunable color temperature. But you can still use the Lux bulbs to create a lighting Scene through the app if it involves a white color. This allows you to set the exact level of brightness you like for a particular lighting scheme and access it at any time with just a quick tap.

Conclusions
Though still a bit pricey, the Philips Hue Lux Starter Kit is definitely a step in the right direction. The Lux bulbs work every bit as well as the original Hue bulbs—you're simply trading the ability to control color for a much lower price. Despite the fact that it can cost several hundred dollars (or more) to outfit your entire home, Philips bulbs offer the widest range of features of all the connected bulbs we've tested so far, so you're actually getting pretty decent value for your money. And since both bulbs work on the same bridge, you don't have to commit to either Hue or Lux.

We still like LIFX's LED Light Bulbs ( at Amazon) , which don't require a bridge and produce a wide array of vibrant colors, but at $99 each they cost even more than Hue bulbs. GE's $15 connected Link bulbs look promising, but they aren't yet available. So right now, the Philips Hue Lux Starter Kit is a great way to begin getting your home lighting connected, and a worthy recipient of our Editors' Choice award.

Philips Hue Lux Starter Kit
4.0
Editors' Choice
Pros
  • Less expensive than Philips Hue bulbs.
  • Simple setup and wireless control.
  • Support for Alarms, Geofencing, and Timers.
Cons
  • Still expensive.
  • White light only.
The Bottom Line

The Philips Hue Lux Starter Kit is a great introduction to the world of connected lighting, offering a white-only counterpart to the original Hue bulb for half the price.

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About Alex Colon

Executive Editor, Reviews

I’m PCMag’s executive editor of reviews, steering our coverage to make sure we're testing the products you're interested in buying and telling you whether they're worth it. I've been here for more than 10 years. I previously managed the consumer electronics reviews team, and before that I covered mobile, smart home, and wearable technology for PCMag and Gigaom. 

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Philips Hue Lux Starter Kit $143.99 at Amazon
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