Philips Hue’s Bridge Pro review: Better lighting

I’ve been a fan of Philips Hue smart lights since the early days. It’s one of the few essential items in my ever-changing smart home. However, when Bridge Pro was launched late last yearit was not immediately clear why the upgrade was necessary. Signature feature Motion Aware – which turns your lights into motion sensors – is neat, but I already have motion sensors. While I run two standard Hue bridges to accommodate all my lights and accessories, I’m not at a point where I need the capacity of the higher Pro. I like the idea of ​​faster response times thanks to the advanced processing power, but it wasn’t quite enough.

Then in April, SpatialAware has arrived. This maps the location of lights in the room to more intelligently distribute the colors and tones of Hue’s lighting scenes across it. Suddenly, my existing smart lights were new again. While MotionAware was the main feature when the Pro launched, it was SpatialAware that finally sold me on the upgrade.

You don’t need a bridge to control your Hue light, but using one unlocks more advanced features, including dynamic lighting. Bridge ProLaunched last September, it is faster and stronger than the standard Hue Bridge. Its quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM support faster response times for connected devices, along with MotionAware and SpatialAware, two features Only work on Pro.

If you’re already invested in the Hue ecosystem, you can upgrade to $140 Bridge Pro It can be meaningful. It lets you add up to four MotionAware zones, which can replace the need to spend $49 on Hue standalone motion sensors. It can handle more than 150 lights and 50 accessories – three times the maximum of a standard bridge – which is useful if you’re maxing out your current setup. And it promises to be so Up to five times faster. The challenge is the price, especially in the United States, where it is expensive 40 percent more From elsewhere (£89.99 in UK/EU).

While the Matter interoperability standard makes it easy to mix and match between smart light brands, there are still some good reasons to stick with one brand. Special features like dynamic lighting, entertainment sync and now Motion Aware and My place As for Hue, it cannot be used when combining products from multiple manufacturers.

However, the standard bridge offers much of the same experience for less money. When the Pro was $98It was an easier decision (and still can be). Find it at this price – for now), but at $140, it becomes more difficult. Here’s how the Bridge Pro’s key features perform in my home.

MotionAware detects movement by Sensing disturbances in ZigBee radio signals Between hue devices. In app, it works like Hue’s standalone motion sensors, but it has specific requirements — and if you need to buy new hardware to meet those requirements, it may be easier to purchase a motion sensor.

The big requirement is that there are three to four Hue lights in the room, and they have to be turned on, so Hue table lamp In the bedroom it was a no-no. I had to add an additional powered lamp to test it there. The bulbs also can’t be in a straight line, so my bathroom, which has one vanity with four Hue bulbs, was out of the picture.

With the appropriate lights in place, the app walks you through leaving the room for a few seconds to calibrate, then lets you choose what happens when motion is detected: turn the lights on and off, group them with other sensors to control them, or send alerts. The last part of Hugh is safethe Hue security system, costs $1 per month or $10 per year. In this review, I focused on the free feature that controls the lights.

As with Hue’s motion sensors, when a MotionAware zone detects motion, you can choose to trigger different scenes or turn the lights on to whatever setting was last turned on. You can also turn it off after a period of inactivity.

I set up MotionAware Zones in the most frequently used areas of my home where I can install enough Hue lights: my bedroom, mudroom/laundry room, living room, and my daughter’s room. Within a day, I canceled three of those.

The bedrooms were unsuitable, as there was no option for a weekend getaway. I turned it off after the first Saturday when the lights came on at 6am because I rolled over in bed. Hue devices’ motion sensors also don’t have weekend settings, but there are workarounds — including Add them to other platforms Which supports weekend automation. Third-party support for MotionAware Regions is currently sparse, but includes… Home helper and Paid app iConnectHue.

In the laundry/mud room area, I have had more success. The lights came on reliably, but only once I was in the middle of the hall. This was too late if I was passing through, but it was okay if I was doing something in the area. Here too the design was an issue; Even though I have four lights, they are not in their ideal places and are all in the ceiling. Having a light near each doorway will make it work faster, but this is not possible in those rooms.

I also tried MotionAware in my office, where I set up two lamps and one ceiling light. It was great at turning on the lights when I got close to my desk, but since it’s a motion sensor and not a presence sensor, it kept turning them off while I worked. For something like Office, it’s newer and more refined Sensor of mm wave It’s the best solution, even though Hue doesn’t offer it. I also had to add an additional motion sensor to catch one corner of the room. This had the advantage of bringing the sensor’s actual light sensor into the mix but emphasizes that MotionAware isn’t always a standalone solution.

I’ve found that MotionAware works best in my living room, a large, open-plan area that’s always a challenge for light. I don’t like overhead lighting, so I set up a combination of ambient lights and task lights. In this space, I don’t need to turn on the lights right away, and in fact I like them to gently fade if I sit still for a while. Combined with SpatialAware, the lights in the room are now relevant and inviting throughout the day.

Aside from the living room, I see no reason to replace my motion sensors with MotionAware. It’s slower, less reliable, and suffers from a point of failure that Hue users will be familiar with: If someone turns off the light at the switch, the feature won’t work.

But for new users, MotionAware makes more sense. It’s easy to set up, as it’s built into your bulb/bridge assembly; There is no need to buy small white boxes to place around the house whose batteries need to be replaced periodically.

that it My placeanother key feature of the Bridge Pro, which is worth upgrading if you’re an existing Hue user. Using Bridge Pro’s advanced processing power and your phone’s augmented reality capabilities, the Hue app can map the lights in a room and determine the best way to distribute a scene’s colors and effects across it. When I saw this In action at CESI was touched. Although I wasn’t able to recreate anything as good as the hotel room demo in my home, my lighting was noticeably better than before.

In the past, I’ve rarely used Hue scenes outside of basic scenes like reading and activating, which only use tunable white lighting (and for those, you only need the ambient white Hue lights, not the more expensive full-color bulbs). I don’t find the multicolor lighting convincing indoors, and when I tried Hue’s more colorful scenes, I was bothered by one red or purple bulb and one green or orange. But using SpatialAware, I’ve found that the scenes fit better into my space, as if they were designed specifically for them. It has made my living room — where I have the largest selection of lights — a much nicer space.

For example, without SpatialAware, selecting a scene like Woodland Toadstool might result in a weird display where one LED glowed red, another glowed yellow, and the light bar was all orange. With SpatialAware, the color distribution across the bulbs is more accurate, and the gradient lighting in my setup (two Wall washers) delivers stronger colors in a more elegant way. The overall effect is more cohesive and natural. I think if I had more step lights it would be better.

Some scenes didn’t show much difference, but most were noticeably better, so much so that I added a couple to my MotionAware zones, so that they would trigger when motion was detected at certain times of the day. My husband came home one night and commented on how beautiful the living room was, and the only thing I changed was the lighting.

There is room for improvement. Only some scenes have been updated to support SpatialAware, and the feature doesn’t work with Zones — groups that can include lights in different rooms, such as a basement or Night Lights. So, if I want the same scene in my living room and my living room, which is part of my downstairs area in the Hue app, I have to set them individually. As mentioned, the effect is best in rooms with a lot of lights, especially step lights that can display multiple colors at once. All of this gets expensive quickly.

I’ve recommended Hue for years because of its high-quality lighting, solid reliability, breadth of product range, and solid performance record. Other brands have cheaper bulbs with brighter colors, but most have less range, nothing dims as well, and the Wi-Fi bulbs aren’t as reliable as Zigbee.

If you’re looking for super-bright colors and brighter RGB scenes, Govee, Nanoleaf, or Lifx may fit your needs better for less money. But for reliable everyday lighting, Hue was and remains the gold standard. And the Bridge Pro is the first upgrade that has truly changed the way I use Hue lights — SpatialAware has taken color-changing scenes from a novelty to a feature I prefer and now use every day.

For me, this is why I bought the Bridge Pro, and if you’re an existing Hue user with a house full of lights, I highly recommend it. But if you’re just getting started with Hue, the Standard Bridge is still a better value, providing access to all the essential features for less than $70. Unless you plan to buy a set of lights in advance, you won’t see enough benefit from the Pro’s key features to justify the extra cost.

Photos and video by Jennifer Pattison Toohey/The Verge