Gadgetory

hey rad Christy R and I've got the Insteon LED bulb we're looking at today and this is a fully automated LED light bulb that retails for $29.99 and this will work with the Insteon Network if you have an entity on hub for instance you'll be able to control this thing now usually with automatable lights we see some sort of control switch or a dimmer module this bulb is different it's got the controls built right in it can communicate directly with the instant hub that's a pretty cool thing we haven't seen that from a lot of other networks so why have an automated light bulb as opposed to a dimmer module or some other separate device well this gives you a little bit of flexibility let's say you wanted to automate the light in your ceiling fan for instance to do that you'd usually have to go and put in a smart switch or go into the actual wiring and make that smart but with this you can just change the light bulb and automate that so it's a lot easier that way with Insteon you'll be able to control the light bulb remotely either from your computer or from a remote controller that you can get separately or with the Insteon app that's available both for iOS and Android devices we're not the biggest fans of this app it's not as strong or well-designed as other ones like it but it does do the job well so right here I've got the bulb in action and this kind of cheap flimsy flex lamp it's a heavy bulb at 6.2 ounces so it barely holds it up but here we go if we turn this on and hit the studio lamp button here I can turn it off and on remotely using my smart phone but not only can I turn it on if I hit this plus sign on the app I can scroll up and down and get the exact percentage I want so I can make it dim I can make it bright I can set it exactly where I want which is a nice feature so we've seen how it stacks up as a smart device but how does the inst ule d-- bulb stack up as a light bulb well it's an 8 watt LED bulb and that's a pretty good number pretty average for that class it's efficient and using those 8 Watts it shines as bright as a 60 watt incandescent light Insteon actually says 60 to 100 watts we think is probably the lower end of that scale it's a little bit dimmer than we would like it's not bad but it's not enough to light up a whole room I would say the Insteon bulb has a CRI number of 82 now what the heck does that mean CRI stands for color rendering index and that is an average think of it as like a GPA for your light bulb and instead of different grades and different classes it's getting different grades for colors so out of one to 100 scale it's getting graded on how accurately it can make a red look and then how accurately can it make green look and yellow-green and all these different shades of different colors and then it a verge of those together and you get a number so in this case that number is 82 and that's pretty good that's a pretty higher end score you want something in the 80s for a bowl but you're gonna spend more than the bargain price on the bottom line is that this is a great device at a great price now I know $30 for one LED light bulb might seem a bit outrageous but there are actually non smart LED bulbs it cost 20 or 25 and this stacks up nicely with them plus it's got all the home automation functionalities so it's a great deal and it comes to the two-year warranty which is nice and reassuring so I say for home Automator is using entity ons network it's a very smart buy for CNET I'm right Chris