3,0 van 5 sterren
Very useful addition to the Lifx range, but needs improvement
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 15 maart 2018
I've been using Lifx for a while, and was interested to see how the new Day & Dusk bulbs compared. They're very good, and do the main job I wanted these bulbs for. If you have trouble sleeping and want to avoid blue light in the evening, as blue light suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin, this is a very nice way to do it, although expensive for your whole home. Using your lights for an artificial sunrise can be a great way to wake up in the morning, and having them dim gradually through a soothing range of warm whites and then oranges in the evening is extremely relaxing. If, on the other hand, you want an all-singing, all-dancing bulb that provides every colour available, go for one of the other options. I've got a mix of both throughout my home, and once the Day & Dusk bulbs came out, stuck to them. A bit of coloured light in the bedroom is nice for multicoloured sunrises in the morning, or for meditation, but otherwise all I want is a range of whites and orange.
You can set the light to brighten gradually in the morning like an artificial sunrise, have it on an ordinary white in the day, and then fade gradually down though warmer shades until it is a soft orange at night. My original Lifx bulbs are set to fade down to red at night, but the orange of the Day & Dusk is fine when it's on a dim setting, and looks pretty.
The light colours are far more limited than with a multicolour smartbulb, and a few people have said they missed having more options in the whites range, mainly 3200K which is missing, but I'm fine with the range here. I prefer 3500K for a daytime white. They're working on allowing you to choose any shade in the range down to a 50K difference, which is still in beta, so 3200K will be available sooner or later. The coldest it gets used to be 4000K, which is the coldest I use anyway, but now goes up to 6500K. I use 4000K (called Cool) for the morning and then move to 3500K (Neutral) after lunch, which is handy for body clock rhythms. Anything colder than 4000K gives me a headache, but I'm more sensitive to lighting than most (I've got ME and get migraines).
What would have been more useful would have been going a bit deeper into the orange range for night use, maybe even into red. That might be just because I'm used to having my smartbulbs on red in the late evening, though, and I reckon the 1500K Candlelight setting that is the warmest here is probably close enough for eliminating blue light, especially when you turn it down. The main thing I'd criticise is that 1% brightness on these bulbs is more like 10% brightness on the original bulbs, so it's not quite as seamless when it fades on or off. They're still my first choice of bulb, and I'm hopeful they will eventually change that in an update.
As ever with Lifx, the app is a little buggy, and expect your bulb to crash regularly and need to be reset by turning it off and on again. This does seem to have improved gradually, they release updates, and I was relieved that this bulb connected peacefully to my wifi network on the first try, which is more than can be said of the previous times I've set up Lifx bulbs. Still, it's a nuisance. You aren't allowed to turn the bulb on and off at the switch if you are going to bed at night, at least not if you want it coming on the next morning as a nice sunrise, but you will have to when you realise it should have changed colour hours ago and must have crashed, and this gets confusing. Edit from December 2019: the firmware has improved significantly, and it's now very rare to need to restart my Day & Dusk bulbs. They just do their thing, now that they're all set up. The original A60 bulbs crash regularly, there are some I have to restart once a week, but there are worse things to live with.
It takes work to figure out the app and the bulb's little ways, and chances are only one person will bother, leaving other household members tapping forlornly at their phone screens and calling out, "Love, the bulb's the wrong colour again, what do I do?" My partner did eventually make the effort to learn, but it took a while.
You can use widgets on your phone or tablet screen for preset colours, including setting up all of some of the bulbs at once. The colour change can be immediate, or it can run for any length of time you like. I've got a setting where I press a widget and the bedroom bulbs fade down to 1% 1500K (orange) over ten minutes for napping, which means that the lighting is getting warmer as well as fading down to practically off. One thing I really like is the scene I set up for if one of us has migraine. Press a widget on the screen, and the bedroom is now lit in very dim orange, while the living room/kitchen is on a medium warm white for if I venture in there for food.
If you think you'll never need to use the light switch again with these bulbs, nope, I'm afraid not. You can't just turn the bulb on with a switch, for instance if you want a temporary nightlight, and by now I have other lamps I use for that. No one wants to faff around with their smartphone in the middle of the night if they wanted to turn on the light to find a sleeping tablet or jump their partner, especially if you are trying to avoid blue light exposure at night. There are smart buttons you could use for this, Flic, but they cost an outrageous amount, have a poor reputation for reliability, and I'd imagine get lost in five minutes flat because they are not attached to the lamp in any way. We did eventually adjust to this, but it's annoying at first.
Lifx is also still getting the hang of the automated day and dusk idea, and it doesn't really work yet. You can use a setting where it changes the brightness on four occasions during the day, with limits on when they can occur (we get up later than it thinks we should, for instance), or you can ignore that and set up your own schedules. Set up your own schedules, it works far better that way, and you can fine-tune it. If you want a colder light for a spell in the morning to help you wake up, you can do that. That said, the brightest white is the neutral one, so they get a bit dimmer as they go to the cooler end of the range. The main reason why I prefer the schedules is because I can change the colour of the lighting far more gradually over the evening, and can also change the colour at any time I like.
If I were to start from scratch with Lifx bulbs, I'd probably just use these ones. Having a full range of colours is fun but I almost never use it. Occasionally I put on a colour-changing setting while meditating using the original Lifx bulbs. I had vague ideas of using a blue or blue-white light in the morning in place of a bright lightbox, as it's strong blue light that helps with serotonin production, but it's never worked out, mainly because blue light gives me a headache for some reason.
I got into using different coloured lights because I have Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder, a circadian rhythm disorder that means that my natural day is 25 hours long and I fall asleep an hour later every day. I initially treated it with a bright lightbox in the morning, which had me on a 24 hour day but falling asleep at 4 am (Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome). Avoiding blue light in the evening is what turned out to work for me, and I also put on orange-tinted glasses at 9.30 every night. Obviously it's relatively rare to have a sleep disorder at this level, most people just want to improve their sleep a bit, but there are a fair number of people who tend to fall asleep later than they'd like and can get somewhere by manipulating light/darkness signals.
My partner has really come to like the way my lighting changes in the evening, he says it's very relaxing and he's noticed a difference with his sleep. With the multicoloured bulbs, he likes having them fade up from purple in the morning for the artificial sunrise, though the orange is fine as well. After I'd finished redoing all the schedules yesterday, I set it to the orange/purple combination to do while meditating in an attempt to see off the headache, and it's very pretty. He can't for the life of him get the hang of the app, despite being a smart man, probably because it needs a ridiculous amount of work.
One reason why I'm sticking with these bulbs is that I think they'll improve, and they release updates, so I've already seen my original Lifx bulbs get a bit less buggy. Edit from December 2019: They've improved a tremendous amount by now, and so has the customer support. I replaced my six overhead lights in the living room with Day & Dusk, which was absolutely worth the outlay. Normally I dislike overhead lighting and find lamps more comfortable on the eyes, but these are great.
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