Depending on the type of bulb you’ve gone for, the lights in your home are either going to be a warm yellow glow or something much cooler with LEDs. What if you could have both?
A single light bulb might actually make that possible, bringing three distinct lighting types to one bulb without using wireless technology to control.
That’s something Philips has already been playing with in its WiFi lightbulb, the “Hue”. In that series of products, an Android and iOS app controls the colour and brightness of wirelessly controlled lightbulbs, using wireless networking to change the hue, illumination amount, and trigger the lights to switch on and off at different times.
A different type of light bulb than the Philips Hue bulbs that can be controlled with smartphones and tablets, the Philips SceneSwitch is about letting you change the colour based on something every home comes with: light switches.
Forget about the phone or tablet, and don’t worry about having a WiFi network because these bulbs are different, rotating instead between one of three different types of light: bright light, natural light, and warm light.
When the light switch is switched on and off in close succession within 15 seconds of each other, the bulb switches into the right lighting mode, with each trigger to on jumping between one of the three modes.
According to Philips, “bright light” involves a colour temperature of 2700 Kelvin and a rating of 800 Lumens (Lm).
Meant for times when you need to focus or wake yourself up, this is pretty much the brightest the SceneSwitch bulbs work at.
Next is “natural light”, which Philips rates at a colour temperature of 2500K and a brightness of 320Lm. You can probably view this as “standard lightbulb”, because this is as close to a regular 40w lightbulb.
Finally theres “cosy, warm light”, and that’s the sort of light you expect to have glow around you, to relax in. A warmer, more yellowy light that’s pretty comfortable, set to 2200K and 80Lm.
Setting these modes is literally done by flicking the switch quickly, much like when you simulate lightning or try and get the attention of your kids by flicking the light on and off quickly.
Do this quickly in the space of 15 seconds and you can jump between one of the three modes. Any longer, however, and the light will just stick with the last used setting, meaning if you like the relaxing warm mode and you leave it on that, provided you use the switch regularly to turn the light on and off, it will stay that way.
Philips didn’t provide pricing to Pickr, but the early research suggests these should sit around $20 each, making them a fairly attractive option if the idea of multi-colour lights are of interest and the $60 to $300 cost for WiFi lights is far too much.
