Lifx Color 1000 review: The best color-changing bulb? Not Hue you think

For years, Philips Hue’s high-profile connected LEDs have been the color-changing smart bulbs to beat.

Well, the Lifx Color 1000 beats them.

Lifx is brighter than Philips Hue. It’s more efficient. It puts out more accurate colors. It boasts the better app of the two. It also closes the gap with Philips’ third-party dominance by featuring compatibility with IFTTT, the Nest Learning Thermostat, and the Amazon Echo smart speaker, among others. Unlike Philips Hue’s Zigbee bulbs, Lifx bulbs communicate using Wi-Fi, which means that they don’t need a hub — and that you don’t need to purchase a $200 starter kit in order to buy in.

At $60 each (about £40, or a little over AU$80), Lifx bulbs are still awfully expensive — perhaps prohibitively so. I know I’m still holding out for the cost of color-changing connected light to come down. Still, if I were buying in today, the Lifx Color 1000 is almost certainly the bulb I’d go with.

The specs

The Lifx Color 1000 looks like a more compact version of the original Lifx LED. It’s the same flat-topped build as before, but roughly half an inch shorter, and with about 2 ounces less heft. It also uses less energy — 11 watts at peak brightness, as opposed to 17 watts from the original.

In spite of this, the new Lifx manages to put out more light than before. When we tested out its brightest setting (the default, a soft white 3,500 K), the original clocked in at 956 lumens. As its name might suggest, the Lifx Color 1000 bumps that number up above 1,000 lumens. With more light from less energy, it’s a clear step forward from generation one and a very efficient lighting option that emits over 90 lumens per watt at peak settings. By comparison, Philips Hue’s newest bulbs put out less than 75 lumens per watt (734 lumens of light output at their brightest setting from a power draw of 10 watts).

The Lifx app offers sixteen separate white-light settings ranging from 2,500 to 9,000 K. If you dial the color temperature up or down from the default 3,500 K setting, the brightness drops off a bit. This fall is a bit more pronounced than it was in generation one, where the warmest and coolest settings — 2,500 K and 9,000 K — are actually slightly brighter than what you see in generation two. That tells me that the second-gen bulb is more specifically calibrated around that default setting and designed to optimize brightness at 3,500 K while still using less energy.

One other note — I appreciated that the Lifx Color 1000 was designed in such a way that the default setting is the brightest part of the spectrum. This isn’t the case with Philips Hue, where the sweet spot in the white light spectrum sits at about 4,000 K — a different color temperature than the bulb’s default.

Still, the Lifx Color 1000 isn’t a perfect design. The flat-topped bulb doesn’t protrude any further than the width of its base, which keeps it from casting as much light downward as it does upward (I had a similar qualm with the Misfit Bolt LED). Lifx makes up for it somewhat by being a much brighter option overall, but I still would have appreciated a more omnidirectional design.

The smarts

You’ll dial between those white light settings using the Lifx app on your Android or iOS device. A quick tap on the “Colors” button switches you over to a full RGB color wheel — rotate your shade of choice to the top, and the bulb will change colors accordingly.

There are a couple of things I like about this approach. First, with a color wheel, it’s easy to turn the specific shade you want to the top. With competitors like Philips Hue and Misfit Bolt, you pick your color by dragging a little light bulb icon over a specific part of a full-screen spectrum. It looks nice, but it’s a bit of a pain in practice — your finger inevitably blocks the part of spectrum you’re aiming for, making it tough to see which shade you’re actually selecting.

I also like the specificity that comes with the Lifx approach. Each of those 16 white-light settings are labeled by color temperature. With the colors, each shade is marked as a specific degree of the circle. In both cases, it’s easy to come back to your exact shade of choice. None of the competitors label the colors in their spectrums like that — if you want to return to an exact shade, you’re forced to approximate it.

The only downside to the color wheel approach is that you can only select one color at a time. With Philips or Misfit, you can change the colors of more than one bulb by dragging bulb icons to multiple parts of the spectrum on a single screen. With Lifx, you can group bulbs together and change them in tandem, but you’ll need to change them one at a time if you want them to shine in different colors.

Tapping on “Themes” brings up a list of preset color cycles that are similar to what you’ll find on the home screen of the Misfit Bolt app. Each one is tied to an emotion like “Cheerful” or “Exciting,” and paired with a colorful icon that gives you a good sense of the variety of tones that will be included. I liked that feature as a no-fuss way to pick out a color cycle for Misfit Bolt, and I like it here with Lifx, too.