Gadgetory

AMC Nets right Chris and today we're taking a look at the color quality of two color changing LED bulbs the Philips hue LED and the lumen LED from taboo now these are both bulbs that have great smart features that you can program on your phone and set to come on and off at different times and automate and interesting ways but today we're not taking a look at that we're just taking a look at how well they actually produce color and that's their core function what we've done is we've compared how each bulb puts out color at different parts of the wavelength to see if they are accurate to see if they give you the light that you want and in some cases like with the color green we found pretty interesting results let me show you what I'm talking about here we have the green incandescent party light that we picked up for about three bucks at the hardware store it's a nice clear bright green light now let's compare that to the lumen LED here in the center it's also very green also very bold striking color looks good but now let's switch over to the Phillips hue we switch to that one on and you can see it's kind of a yellowy tennis ball green and that's as green as it gets with the hue if we play with the app and move that slider around through the green part of the spectrum that is as green as it gets so how does an LED make green light anyway well it has diodes inside of it and here we're looking at a Philips you bulb that has the bulb off of it so we can see the diodes and you know you'd want an equal number of yellow and blue to add up to really good green light and with the Philips hue we've got five really bright yellow diodes and then two rather dim blue diodes and that's your problem you just don't have enough blue to add up to a bright vivid green it's going to be yellow and washed out because those yellows are so overpowering now funky colored light that you'd use it a party is all well and good but these bulbs also offer basic warm white light and the Philips hue does a much better job with that then the lumen bulb does the Philips hue bulb has an entire spectrum in the app where you can select all different color temperatures of incandescent style light you can go 2700 k yellow light or you can go higher up around five 6000k that kind of white bluish light and we tested this out and all of those were very accurate you can see that little curve on the graph there that's the range of light that a incandescent bulb will put out at different color temperatures and you can see as we move the Philips hue bulb around that spectrum it's always falling right on that curve and that's a really really good sign that's a good result tells us it's a very accurate bulb at representing what an incandescent would give you so if you want a bulb that can accurately produce different incandescent style lights the Philips ego is much better than the lumen bulb which only gives you one default warm white setting at about 2700 k we've talked a lot about the novelty factor with these color-changing bulbs and i think that the lumen LED is more of the novelty bulb it's a little better a color better at greens and blues and probably better for a party if you want to have a light that's changing colors in the corner of the room but for overall basic lighting a bulb you can put anywhere and use however you like the Philips hue is actually the more comprehensive and better option it's got that wide range of warm white sand daylight and soft white type light you're not going to get that with the lumen LED so just a little food for thought next time you're shopping for bulbs for seeing that I'm red crest you