SVET LED Light Bulb & Philips Hue: Time To Choose (part 1)
A lot of questions we get via social media, emails and during conferences can be bluntly boiled down to one: what's the difference between SVET and Philips Hue? To an average consumer, the products may indeed look very similar in purpose and technology, so the question is certainly justified.
In order to answer this question as thoroughly as possible, we made a detailed comparison of the SVET and Philips Hue light bulbs, so you can be ahead of the game the next time you’re out for quality home or office lighting.
The comparison is split into two articles. The first one will cover the main differences without any technical details, while the second one will be more technical, explaining the differences in specs.
So, starting off, the three most important points anyone should consider when choosing a smart lighting solution are as follows: health benefits, quality, and usability. Let’s figure out what each of these means.
Health Comes First. Entertainment Comes Second
The Philips Hue Light Bulb, being a side-product of the Philips company, was created as an extension of their wide range of entertainment hardware. Following the company’s philosophy, it’s an entertainment product first and foremost, and a lighting solution second.
Apart from the standard Hue bulb, Philips offers a range of other light bulbs, like Hue Go, Hue Beyond, Hue Phoenix, Hue Bloom and so on, each better suited for different applications and tasks. This variety is great because it allows you to select an option best suited for your needs and interior. It constitutes the ecosystem of Hue products (the Hue family).
Specifics aside, all Hue family light bulbs have the same basic technology and mode of operation. They produce shades of white light and are able to blend different colors to enhance your interior space. With full control over the lighting Hue bulbs produce, any creative ideas can come to life with a single touch of a button (provided you configured everything correctly).
With the amount of customizability Hue provides, it’s possible to set it up to improve your living conditions by outputting healthy light. To do that, though, you must know which light is right for every hour of the day, and in what quantities. Needless to say, this kind of is tuning is only available to experts.
At the end of the day, probably the best way to describe Hue light bulbs is “interior mood lighting”.
On the other hand, SVET light bulbs are a new generation of high-quality LED bulbs with several features designed specifically to improve health. The light SVET bulbs produce mimics natural sunlight dynamics, supporting your biological rhythm (or the so-called “circadian rhythm”) on a daily basis.
The SVET's technical capacity and collaborative research with Fraunhofer Institute made it possible to develop a number of personalised lighting scenarios for various everyday activities. For example, SVET has built-in functionality to help you sleep better, decrease stress on wakeup, increase productivity, and make relaxation easier. No matter the mode you choose, SVET's light will remain dynamic: it will constantly change according to the Sun's cycle, taking into account current season, time of day, location, and your personalised settings.
Hue products have human-centric presets too, like the Relax, Reading, Concentrate, and Energize modes. The big difference is, all these presets are static – the light remains the same during the day and night. This makes it not suitable for prolonged use, as the same lighting can have vastly different effects depending on the current time and other factors.
The dynamic nature of all SVET lighting scenarios makes SVET able to prevent SAD (seasonal affective disorder). Achieving this with Philips Hue can be challenging if you have unusual work and sleep hours, or if you live in a time zone where sunlight is less regular, such as Finland, or WA, USA.
The other thing about SVET that makes it more health-focused than other smart light bulbs is its biological safety feature. It ensures that no matter the settings (SVET allows you to fully customize light output) you will not harm your circadian rhythm. For example, it will prevent you from selecting a mode or light color which can hurt you at that time of day.
In manual control mode, SVET allows you to have all the entertainment of mood lighting, but with the addition of health-improving features and safety measures.
Quality Of Lighting Defines Your Home Environment
The quality of a light bulb is determined by its lifespan and the quality of light it produces. The lifespan of a Philips Hue is 15,000 hours, while SVET bulbs boast the lifespan of 30,000 hours. The full warranty of both Philips Hue and SVET is 2 years, but SVET additionally has a limited warranty of 5 years. During this time SVET light bulbs are guaranteed to maintain the same level of light quality.
Going into the details of light quality, we should start by comparing the color rendering index of Hue and SVET. The CRI range of Philips Hue is 80-90, while that of SVET is 90-96. It’s considered that the greater the CRI, the better the light source, since the higher CRI means more natural colors (with sunlight being the point of reference for CRI 100). However, the CRI metric is not linear. The difference between CRI 90 and CRI 95 is double the color rendering quality.
Another aspect of light quality is the spectrum. SVET has rich spectrum, while the spectrum of Philips Hue is poorer. Having rich spectrum allows you to see more colors in your surroundings with minimal distortions. Generally, rich spectrum translates into increased eye comfort.
Additionally, SVET uses analog dimming to remove flickering in all lighting scenarios. Simply put, SVET light bulbs are flicker-free. Philips Hue bulbs don't employ this technology, which leads to flickering when changing the brightness. It’s best to avoid flickering whenever possible, as prolonged exposure to flickering lights may cause headaches and migraines, or even worsen the symptoms of other serious conditions, like depression.
Usability, Control And Connectivity
According to the Philips Hue website, the Philips Hue comes with a starter kit, which also contains a power adapter, an Internet network cable and a bridge. Setting up a room with smart lighting, in this case, can amount to a lot of work.
Consider the following: after you screw in the bulbs into the sockets according to the manual, you need to mount the bridge to a wall somewhere. The bridge will serve as the link between the Internet, your mobile device, and the Hue bulbs. It connects to WiFi via the router, and can connect up to 50 Hue bulbs at a time.
With SVET, the setup process is much easier.
And by the way, each time you buy and install a new light bulb, it’s added to a shared network. One network supports up to 200 light bulbs.
The best part of SVET technology policy is the ability to configure all settings via the SVET app for the whole lighting system at once. After that, you can forget about the app and use only your wall switch to turn the light bulbs on and off. The bulbs will not only remember the settings; they will automatically adjust the brightness and CCT based on time of day.
With Philips Hue, you have to set up your lighting manually every time using the app or Internet. You can always achieve automation with the IFTTT service, but your light bulbs must remain turned on all the time.
SVET allows you to further personalize your light day by setting your usual (or desired) wake-up and bedtime. After that SVET automatically gives you a necessary portion of blue light in the morning (doubling as a light alarm clock), white light during the day and warm light to ease you into sleep in the evening, according to the initially selected mode. Even if you come home and turn on the light in the evening, it will know what time it is and which scenario should be executed.
We hope the article helped clear some confusion regarding these smart lighting solutions. With the world becoming more conscious of light quality and its influence on human health, it’s truly marvellous how easy it becomes to improve lighting conditions – and life quality – for people of all incomes and demographics.
Like water and air, light is something we consume daily, and its quality (or lack thereof) should be given careful consideration by anyone looking to live healthily. Thankfully, we have no shortage of choice of quality light nowadays.
Read more about Philips Hue and SVET.
by Aleksey Dubov, Founder @ SVET