Patrons of the channel have uncovered some more info which... makes the future look less bright. It looks like Home Depot is indeed no longer going to stock these in-store and is clearancing out what remains. Whether they'll continue to sell them online is unclear. Confounding things, these aren't state-of-the-art when it comes to their efficiency. I mean, it's still very good if you ask me! Near 100 lumens per watt, but they're eclipsed by newer bulbs. In markets which rate bulbs by their efficiency these look worse compared to their peers. There's also some speculation that these don't meet certain regulatory requirements for light quality. That I'm unsure of because the rated CRI of the product line varies, with many achieving 90. In any case, I would think Philips could update this product line to be more efficient and meet whatever other requirements might be needed, but I'm afraid there's little reason for them to do it. Kicking and scream I shall be, a little bit.
Brother, I also have a Philips story and full-well know the pain of losing access to bulbs that you love. However, in a twist, this one was not due to a decision by Philips! A few years ago CA passed a law banning the sale/import of all bulbs that were not on a specific "approved" list maintained by the state. This meant that store shelves had a very barren selection of bulbs with limited color and size/base options. Doing online research I found a perfect Philips LED replacement to my lamps that actually met state criteria, but because it was not yet on the import list I could not buy it via Amazon or other major retailers. So I had to resort to the only thing you can do when faced with a product ban: smuggling. I knew that a friend would be returning from AZ soon so I asked him to bring me a box of these bulbs so I'd have plenty to last me many years into the future regardless of how laws might change.
Regulatory light quality (I presume less blue light) would be originating from the EU. If you would like these bulbs to continue, there needs to be a way to repair them or perhaps have an open source design. I too find internet enabled options troublesome for a number of reasons. Besides handing control over to another party data mining on personal subjects/choices is becoming much more pervasive. Major corporations are starting to want to track how you vote.
Since people are mostly anything but smart, the industry will certainly proceed to take away the real smart products and replace them with products that have smart in their name. You better stock up some more!
As an assistant manager at a hotel, I have been trying to explain this color light thing to the engineers and upper management, telling them to buy, at the very least, the same light temperature for all the bulbs and not mix them in the room. To this day, they still don't get it when one bulb in a dual fixture is a bright white and the other is a soft orange-red.
Huh. I actually deliberately mix the color of light bulbs in my living and working spaces. It feels more like sunlight than just the "daylight" cool color bulbs alone.
LOL one room I rented (a Microtel I think?) had a bedside lamp with one warm and one cool bulb in it. It alternated each bulb, then both were on, mimicking 3-way with 2 bulbs. I bet it was a mistake, but I found it a nice feature that I could "control" the color LOL
LIGHT’s LIKE MUSIC. When given the option to buy Super CD or DVD Audio with amazing sound… nearly everyone chose MP3-128k files that sounded like crap (and SACD, DVD-A died). People just don’t care about quality in music or lighting .
@@electrictroy2010 There used to be an hour long radio program every weekday at noon called "Jack up the 80s". well, they still have it, but they stripped it of everything that made it worth listening to. It used to be an hour of 80s tunes, on vinyl or reel. even over the radio the difference was surreal. the DJ played a lot of B sides and back catalogue stuff too, so there were so many songs that I had never heard before, and even the ones I had heard, even popular songs that are well known and had been chart topping singles, I'd never heard the original analogue recordings. The first time I heard Janey's Got a Gun on that show my mind was blown. I never noticed the drum in the intro is supposed to be a gun shot, it doesn't pop in the digital remaster like it does on vinyl. "easy lover" is also a lot easier to listen to. either way, my work day would come to a grinding halt and that hour was spent glued to the radio. then they changed it and it's just an hour of the same 80s tunes you hear any other time you listen to songs from that decade, and the guy hosting is just a generic talking head. but also yes, listening to high quality digital recordings is absolutely worth it. I don't see how people can't appreciate the experience... or how they can not value it enough to even keep what they have for physical media.
These lamps were my saving grace when I was tasked with converting our historic theatre’s chandelier and house lights from tungsten to LED. Over 250 of them. The warm shift was a must for me, and they look gorgeous in our theatre. Sad to hear, and a bit worried once replacements begin to become needed.. Time to stock up!
You're doing a very valuable job. It's thanks to you that the task didn't get assigned to someone who's not worth their salt as a lighting coordinator who would probably just replace all the lights with an obnoxious blue hue.
This video made me wonder why I haven't yet seen an LED theatrical lighting fixture with this temperature shift. Do you know of any? I mean, it's not too hard to program this on the console, but I can certainly see some advantages of having it built into the fixtures. There is never enough tech time, so if having a Dynamic White (or whatever they want to call it) mode would save even a few minutes of programming time on any given day I'm sure a lot of venues would love it!
@@NealMiskinMusic the reason is the following: We used to dimm down for cto effect. We needed more lighs for the same or even enough light on stage. Its way more easy to just controlle ct on its own so if you want a different ct and touch the intensity if you want less brightness. The alternative would be dealing with a arbitrary dim/ct curve and more lights. In addition with Camaras being often a part of the equation you do want intensity independent stable color temperature. Greeting
increasingly this channel feels like 'old man yells at clouds', where Alec is the old man and the clouds are his favorite bits of electronics. It's good. I like the channel.
I had one of these fail on me a couple years ago - it was the clear globe version with the "edison filament". I called Phillips, thinking they would stand behind their product. They actually told me that they wouldn't replace it because I did not use an approved dimmer. Turns out, they didn't have any approved dimmer for the bulb and I was out of luck and I should not use the bulbs with a dimmer. Funny huh? Even the person on the phone sounded confused.
What, I also have a hue bulb, but mine is "smart" so has Bluetooth connection and an inbuild dimmer, was this the case with you too, or did you use a manual dimmer?
@@TEAserOne yeah the hue are a different animal entirely. I love Philips bulbs otherwise. The best one I’ve found lately is only sold in Canada and has 3000K temperature which is my preferred for kitchens and bathrooms. So far no reliability issues there crossing my fingers.
@@Ryan-di5zo Yeah I don't own a Phliips Hue bulb, well I do, but that's just the Branding, all "Phillips" bulbs produced after 2015 aren't actually produced by Phillips anymore but by the company Signify that is basically the old Phillips Lighting department but it became it''s own thing.
Hey, in case these do get discontinued, IKEA seems to make high quality LED bulbs with the same effect under their "Ledare" line. They call it warm dimming so look out for that if you ever run out of these! Edit: looks like these are getting discontinued too. Why, IKEA?!
I have had two ikea "trådfri" (which means wire-free btw) bulbs fail within a year hopefully their "ledare" (which mean conductor btw) bulbs are better. I gave up with their smart bulbs and just bought a normal non dimmable led bulb for my room. (Which has worked great)
The longest lasting LED bulb I’ve ever had within an IKEA bulb in one of those articulating desk lamps. I had several of them mounted along the back wall of my woodworking bench so that I could positioning at any place when carving, which often needs like to be cast in strange and odd ways to help show the details of the work. That shop didn’t have air-conditioning either and I had several of those on pretty much 23 hours a day for six years and none of them blew.
@@hullinstruments Agreed. I've had several IKEA LED bulbs for that I've been using for 6+ years and not a single one has died on my yet. It's possible their smart bulbs are worse quality, but I don't care for smart bulbs anyway.
@@bjs242 kinda unlikely but companies can sue you if you talk abt ur brand badly (in the USA at least). Fucked but if the guy works there probably just protecting himself
The endings of these videos are always my favorite, not because of the blooper reel (though those are great in their own right), but because of the captions afterward. Every video is a joy to experience. Thank you for continuing to make them.
I simply love the work put into the captions. It adds a certain flair that I've never seen done before, and it is brilliant! also, the humor is great. I've seen several videos with little bits in the middle of the videos as well on the captions.
We use a lot of these bulbs at Disney theme parks. We have a lot of “lanterns” around the park that flicker and dim to simulate a flame. These are the closest we’ve found to simulating a classic incandescent look. Hopefully they don’t get discontinued.
You know they have LED "flame" bulbs, right? I put one in the pole light in front of my in-laws' house as a joke, thinking it would be funny for a while and then the bulb would die. To my surprise, it looks pretty cool and it's been going strong for 2 years+... outside. Go check them out. Though I'm kinda shocked Disney wouldn't have a better version of the bulb I just described already.
@@MrEazyE357 Yes. The most realistic lantern simulation is typically an incandescent lamp programmed to flicker subtly. The flame bulbs are fun, but not at all realistic in terms of color accuracy and animation. That being said - they aren’t dedicated enough to spend the money to have a custom developed bulb for this purpose. At least, not yet.
Man oh man I hear ya! And agree 100%! My recent struggle was finding LED under-cabinet lighting that I could dim to a warm hue, but there seems to be nothing available. However, I did discover what is called "dim to warm" LED tape that is constructed exactly the same as the Philips bulbs--a white LED paired with an amber one. And it doesn't need a controller. It isn't cheap, and I now need to assemble all my under-cabinet lighting from parts. But for those of us who really want that warm glow at low levels, it's worth it!
17:05 And through the magic of buying ALL OF THEM… Great video Alec, very interesting. I still live with my parents (I’m almost done with college) and I always just use whatever bulbs they have lying around. I will say one issue with smart bulbs that are connected to the internet. Last month, my house was struck by lightning and it took out the internet for a day or so. My brother has smart bulbs in his room connected to his echo dot. Because the internet was out, he couldn’t turn his lights on because he used he Alexa to turn them off the night before and not the switch. Honestly it would have been worse if they got stuck on like red or blue or something like that. His room is also in the basement and so doesn’t get much natural light. Also, now that I know about them, I actually like the idea of daylight balanced bulb. I’m studying software engineering and spend a lot of time working indoors. I like bright white light bulbs personally because it makes the room very bright and almost like sunlight, making it feel like a beautiful summer day, but also find it a little too obnoxiously bright at night. These sound like a perfect solution for my preferences.
I still can't wrap my head around the idiocy of internet light bulbs. Internet dropouts happen. Quite frequently in some places. Selling a utility as essential as indoor lighting with such a massive flaw as being rendered inoperable during an outage seems like a big scam to get people buying more light bulbs.
That would be why there was the recommendation to use something like zigbee with a bridge, you don't need the wider Internet to control your lights then, just local power. Also some smart lights will reset to factory defaults if you flick them on and off a few times, not ideal as you'll have to reconfigure them afterwards, but at least you can have light.
If you use something that only uses the local network to control your lighting (homeassistant for instance), you won't need an internet connection even with internet connected bulbs. I have a Sonoff SV based light (that's internet connected) that works just fine without an internet connection, it can even be controlled by my google home over LAN. That being said though, mesh networks like z-wave or matter are still superior for other reasons.
@@ViciousVinnyD Not so much buying more light bulbs as buying more expensive light bulbs. Sure you may be throwing away a bit of usable life in your old bulbs (if you're doing it all at once on an existing fixture) but I would hope these new bulbs have a comparable life expectancy to the one you're getting rid of. The smart bulbs are just more expensive. I think in general smart bulbs are dumb because why are you intentionally building the smart part into something that is disposable?
LIFX have (had?) a contingency in place for a situation like this. If you power cycle them twice with a deliberate gap, they reset their color and lumen to a default bright white. Hue may have something similar. Maybe Nanoleaf too.
We hope that you feel the same warmth from all of us that you do from these lovely old-timey-lookin' bulbs... please don't feel any pressure over when your next video is coming, and you never have to worry about us forgetting you in our feeds whenever there's some lag between releases. This video is charming and now if you'll pardon me I have to get to the store for..... reasons. 💡😊 P.S. - You win classy person points for the Knives Out reference. 😁
this is why i am glad dev isnt in the same state as me, im already competing with alec for rare lightbulbs, dont think i can even still buy the remote phosphor led bulbs locally anymore, i lucked out finding 1 recently in a box of old stuff!
I will NEVER buy a light bulb that needs a phone. Ain't gonna happen. . It's a light bulb. The only reason they are doing this is to get into your phone. I would rather sit in the dark.
2 things (among many) that I like about your presentations: You write your own closed captions!! Damn I wish more people would do that. And, your creativity with the English language. It's always an improvement when you make up a word. Sometimes they're so good I stop and say, "Wait ... "
True. The CC stuff especially annoys me if people are already reading off a script and still don't provide subtitles. Like, you have it typed out already, and there is software that will sync the CC to the video
Absolutely agree on the subs. I watched a video on the history of subtitles, and it went over how TV broadcasts have to have them (in the US, not sure about other countries) and I never realized that accessibility was something we lost in the internet video rush. So many channels I watch don't have them and it's frustrating. probably more frustrating for people who actually need them for various reasons
Subs are good for being subs. Subs on TH-cam are bad because they feed the algorithm monster than will recognize speech much better in the future to ban disobedient speakers.
The other problem as someone who likes to remodel and update homes, is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find fixtures that even use replaceable bulbs, especially when trying to go for a specific style. This makes it really great when the led malfunctions and you now have to replace the entire fixture.
I had no idea these existed… Such a shame they’re hard to find now. When I was making a concept art of a futuristic apartment I thought about using daylight-balanced ambient lights and warm exposed lights, with the same idea of dimming the cool lights first to make the room warmer as it gets dimmer.
I love Phillips WarmGlow but I was always worried this would happen. When I try to explain this exact thing to most people they think I'm crazy. Eventually we'll reach a point where nobody remembers bulbs glowing warmer when they dimmed and this feature will become unnecessary. This is bad for me, but most people won't even know the difference.
You’re not alone in your quest for warm welcoming LED lighting. As an engineer and an interior designer I feel exactly the same way. I’ve seen daylight bulbs lighting peoples homes and especially their front porches that cast the coldest most ghostly light that is far from being welcoming and it can make thing like paint, fabric and even food look off. And smart switches over smart bulbs: hell yeah.! We have one smart bulb and are not fans. Great video 👍🏽
The most-stark differences, seem to be stores that change from long fluorescents to LEDs! The new LEDs, looked bright in a rather strange way! (If not an outright bad way!) I guess that the CRI dropped in many cases, too! Noticed that in a Dollar General in the late-2010s and the same kind of thing in a Shaw's, IIRC. (Also, in the late-2010s, IIRC) It was mostly with the ceiling fluorescents being changed to LEDs.
LIGHT’s LIKE MUSIC. When given the option to buy Super CD or DVD Audio with amazing sound… nearly everyone chose MP3-128k files that sounded like crap (and SACD, DVD-A died). People just don’t care about quality in music or lighting .
I prefer the warm lighting options too! I hope they don't stop making the warm bulbs. I imagine that anyone who suffers with headaches prefers the warm lighting. That was my main complaint with the new bulbs when all of this started, they were all blaring blue/white light and cold. I prefer the cozy and warm light better, especially when reading a real book on a rainy day. Keep up the great work with your videos!
Mine had led fixtures, but no led dimmer switches. I didn't know, and didn't know to check. Now mine mine has replaceable bulb fixtures with led compatible dimmers after the fixtures decided to have a disco party.
I had the same problem. Are they just bulbs, tho? Can you swap them out? I only had one that I don't think I can swap (a daylight LED above the sink), so I just swapped out the bulbs in the kitchen's main light fixture to be daylight as well. Looks SO much better. I went and took every bulb out of every fixture, and re-installed them to make sense. Had to buy some as well, since there were no dimmable WARM bulbs. I bought the ones in this video!
I worked at Home Depot for eight years stocking shelves before escaping last autumn. I was the guy who knew the electrical department better than anyone else on my crew. I can't speak for this particular product, but I can say there was an *absurd* amount of product turnover, increasingly so the last few years. We seemed to clearance out the majority of the lighting products roughly three times a year towards the end. As the guy desperately trying to find places to put overstocked clearance items that we had no place to set out for sale, because every single spot to shelf clearance items was being used, I was not a happy camper.
my HD has (in my opinion, *too many* ) makeshift displays and even pallets just placed in the wide raceway aisles piled with clearance items... it's getting old and barely no room to walk in some areas...
Can we give this man an award for “Best Knives Out Reference in a TH-cam Video About Phillips Lighting Products”? I mean, it’s a pretty niche category, but he definitely deserves it.
It appears Philips has refreshed this line as “Ultra Definition” and still includes the Warm glow effect. I’ve seen this new line sold at Kroger (grocery store). Edit: Also sold through Walmart.
This is correct. I work at a hardware store and just looked at our order catalog and all the Warm Glow series show discontinued with a replacement link leading to the equivalent Ultra Definition version, which just became available this month.
Home Depots in my area have gone to Feit Electric as their supplier for most of their light bulbs but I can confirm that Philips bulbs are being sold at my closest Walmart
Deep-diving into things, it looks like the thing you really want to look for is "Eye Comfort" which Philips says is "tunable," meaning color temp shifts. Those are also part of the Ultra Definition line but it looks like not all products in Ultra Definition have warm glow (which is fine! I don't want every bulb to be warm glow... I just want to be able to buy warm glow.)
Did a google based on your coment. Seems the Ultra definition bulb come in -Warm white(2700) or daylight(5000K) -CRI 95, finally! Hopefully there are no big holes in the specturm. -RED(R9) = ? couldnt find value yet. The warm-glow series had R9 of 50, and it was not deep-red but the pastel-red we know from fluorescent tube lighting. Which is most likly the most efficient phosphor in terms of energy efficiency. -Dimable with that familar "incandescent like" colour-temperature shift -filament style bulbs
At the part from 17:01, I lost it and cracked up. Never stop being the particular flavor of maniac you are. I genuinely love your stuff and appreciate your style.
He is definetly NOT alone on this. I hate when something I like gets discontinued. Thats why I have 4 pairs of my favorite everyday shoes, and 8 computer mice since I finally found a shape I like and can use 8-10 hours a day.
Your videos never disappoint! I get such a nostalgic vibe from your editing, music choice and just every other aspect of the video - it reminds me of watching "How it's made" as a kid. I love the little jokes you insert here and there, they play along with the cozy feeling I get while watching. Thanks for continuing your fantastic work, I really appreciate every upload on this channel as well as connextras!
I’m amazed that every time that I watch a video about a simple subject, this time a light bulb, for 20 minutes, i still learn more then I even expected. Keep it up, your videos are amazing.
Oh, so that's why my memories of childhood are warm and cozy looking. I honestly think if I walked into a room with early '00s lighting I would cry just from the nostalgia and comfort.
I would with monitors and TVs, too! CRTs (a.k.a. "tube") don't have the color and lag issues that LCD screens have. I still have plenty of working incandescents! Because number one, I purchased new-old-stock incandescents in the very-late-2010s. (looks like they were made in 2014, most likely) But it looks like they can outlast cheap LEDs!
I work in electronics R&D and supply issues haven't improved at all since it started. I doubt that is purely the reason they're discontinuing these bulbs, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a large contributor.
I take it he's not the type to be riding BNSF or CP etc... I could totally see him doing a video on the differences between riding 48' and 53's though. "Riding suicide on the fly!? That's just cray cray."
thumbs up to the magic of buying ALL of them ;) i am a fan of warmer lighting as well .. but that could just be my eye sensitivity after retinal detachment and cataract surgery.
@@grayrabbit2211 yep high myopia (-14.0, -13.5) was the main cause at age 42. triggering event on a long weekend monday after i had just pulled a 30 hour poker session. because i had been wearing sunglasses the whole time, i thought the gradual dimming over the hours was just me getting tired, but once i got out into the sunlight the true situation revealed itself. walked home in 5 mins, did a quick google search, called a buddy to drive me over to the hospital ER and the GP confirmed retinal detachment. ambulance to eye specialist intern that night. eye surgeon tuesday morning. surgery to place sclerotic buckle wednesday afternoon. canadian healthcare rocks when it counts. laid up in facedown apparatus chair for 6 weeks off work. 2 years later, as expected cataract surgery (-1.5,-1.5 !!) so i can now officially drive without glasses (though i don't). still some lingering uveitis issues in the affected eye, but both retinas still currently stable 10 years on. your optometrist can keep a lookout, but if you are seriously worried, try to get a referral to an ophthalmologist so you can have a baseline established. feels weird in the waiting room surrounded by folks all 30 years older, but what can you do ?
@@senatorhung Eek. Your #s aren't that far off from where I am. Fortunately no issues yet, but I usually do get an eye exam once a year. The whole lockdown/offices closed/masking crap had gotten in the way of that. Hoping to be able to get an eye exam soon. Thank you for sharing your experience... I'll definitely be asking many questions at (hopefully) this year's exam.
@@grayrabbit2211 your optometrist can definitely keep a lookout for any eye inflammation or excess ocular pressure. another warning sign is if you get more than the occasional fireworks burst of floaters .. a sign of a possible loose blood vessel at the back of the eye that might induce a detachment if left untreated. as you get older, higher myopia will also stretch your central retina possibly leading to myopic macular degeneration (unlike the 'regular' age-related macular degeneration) and leads to a fuzziness in central vision. not much you can do about that though. there are studies in youngfolk that spending more time outdoors can help slow down increases in myopia (either bright sunlight OR looking longer distances at the horizon - relevant factor still being investigated), but no studies on already myopic adults that i've heard of.
@@senatorhung Optometrists are the leading cause of high myopia. There are a few "rogue" ones which practice myopia reduction out there but they tend to stay quiet, as this goes against the industry (read: $$$) The focusing mechanism of the eye is just a bunch of muscles. Even in old age, you can still build up muscles. BUT your muscles will never get stronger if you brace (wear glasses) those muscles all the time.
I feel very strongly about warm/soft lighting as well, so much so that I bring warm glow bulbs with me when travelling so I can be comfortable in hotel rooms that are polluted with cold (or worse, cold and flickering) light. I swap them back before I leave, of course.
That’s a great suggestion, I now know what to do when I travel, I will just take some daylight balanced bulbs with me, so I can actually *see* when I’m trying to work in hotel rooms that inexplicably come with only “warm” lighting. (In fairnesses, I’m a cheapskate, so usually stay at the cheapest motels I can find, so most likely the clientele is looking for “romantic” lighting, not functional.) Perhaps in an ideal future, hotel rooms will have color changing bulbs such that occupants can choose the color temperature they prefer.
@@jpe1 if people are going to a hotel for “romance” then they’re not really looking for romance. Just to say I don’t think they’d care about the color temperature of the lighting fixtures.
LIGHT’s LIKE MUSIC. When given the option to buy Super CD or DVD Audio with amazing sound… nearly everyone chose MP3-128k files that sounded like crap (and SACD, DVD-A died). People just don’t care about quality in music or lighting .
Oh man, I didn't know these existed but it's basically exactly what I want out of LED bulbs, shame I'm only hearing about them as they're seemingly on their way out lol
Look out for 'edison style' led bulbs, these have pretend filaments in them and a lovely warm light. Not dimmable though, but I love the light they give.
I think the brightness color temp relation is baked into our vision system (due to sources such as the sun and fire), so this effect not only mimics incandescent bulbs, but also the types of light that we have evolved with.
@@ohioplayer-bl9em It also affects your circadian rhythm, which is why some companies like Apple decided to introduce a warm dim setting on ipads and iphones.
i’ve replaced every bulb in my house with philips hue years ago, it cost a fortune to do but i’ve no regrets. i usually have them set to warm white or dim coloured at night, the ONLY time to use bright white is for cleaning and for that reason alone it’s worth having the option as it makes it so much easier to see what’s clean or not, but yeah… way too harsh for anything else
I'm thinking of putting the White Ambience Hue in my kitchen, but most of my rooms are at 4000K Philips Neutral White so I'm not sure how I might end up controlling the colour temp (aside from the cooker hood having a 3000K light)
@@samuell.foxton4177 you can set the colour or temperature they automatically use when turned on if that’s your concern, and change them at will in the app then
So did I. Took forever to get enough downlights because they so rarely were in stock. I use the very hot color temperatures in my office, which doesn't have a window for natural light. The bluer light helps my day/night cycle. The biggest advantage of the smart bulbs, though, is that there's no constraints on what bulbs go to which switches in any combination or grouping. I've got a light over the kitchen sink that isn't on its own circuit, but now, I have a switch set just for that one bulb so I can turn it on and off by itself. And if I turn all the kitchen lights on, that one is still included in all the kitchen lights. I've also got a button that turns off every light in my house so I don't have to check if I've turned all my lights out in all the rooms. Just hit one button on the way out the door.
The other reason to use daylight colour is that people show up better on camera. Complexions look much more natural. Make everybody else on the zoom call look like a weird sallow goblin.
When I worked in the retail lighting industry, we had a product that mixed both cool (6k) and warm (3k) diodes in order to get a higher cri than either individual diode was capable of.
I love these, too! The house I'm renting had a mixture of different color temperatures, brightnesses, incandescent, florescent, low-quality LEDs, and burnt out bulbs. One fixture even had three different kinds mixed together. I bought new bulbs and now my living-room, dining-room, and bed-rooms are filled with a cozy, warm, dimmable light. My kitchen, mud-room, and bath-room are a nice bright day-light. I bought extra-bright bulbs for the kitchen, so now the whole room feels lit up. It's made such a positive difference in my mood. I can actually cook now. Even my friend noticed the positive change.
I unload and stock for Lowes, so I can confirm that Lowes stocks primarily GE bulbs. I can't remember for sure, but I seem to recall seeing a similar feature to Phillips's Warm Glow effect from GE in the store (though I would have to look again to confirm). I do know based upon what we stock that so called “tuneable white” bulbs have become *incredibly* popular, to the point where we sell contractor-special-style LED fixtures with tuneable colour temperature. I'll try to remember to update this comment once I've checked in at work. Edit: See my reply below for the update
@@KittyTwitty9876 Bad news, I'm afraid. So, checking our lighting section, it's been rearranged since last I thoroughly pursued it, and the variety of bulbs has somewhat decreased. I can once again confirm that my Lowes stocks GE bulbs to the near exclusion of all else (the only other brands being Feit Electric and Cree Lighting, and only for smart bulb products). GE names their colour temperature lines, calling them, in order of increasing colour temperature: Relax, for their soft white 2700K options; Reveal, which offers a temperature of 2850K and a bunch of BS about colour purity; and Refresh, for their daylight-tuned offerings. They also have something called Vintage, which I thought *might* have the feature described in this video, but upon closer examination they had as few as 1 “filament”, so it is highly unlikely. Unfortunately, I couldn't say for sure because our display for them has been broken since I was hired. Vintage is interesting because it has two versions, one with clear glass that outputs around 2700K, and another with amber-tinted glass that outputs at 2000K. For the sake of completeness, I also checked all the bulbs that offered any kind of “adjustable white”. Unfortunately, the offerings from GE (via their Cync[sic] product line), Cree, and Feit all go from 2700K to 6000K; that and the fact that they all used Wi-Fi rather than Zigbee or Z-Wave meant that they are therefore not suitable for Alec's use case. Also, on the point of the “adjustable white” contractor specials, those fixtures are intriguing as well because their adjustment is done at time of install, they don't have any smarts to them. That said, they are also 4 times the price of the normal, daylight-tuned contractor special LED fixtures, so they're probably more for owners looking to replace an existing fixture, rather than being for new installations. Whether the GE equivalent was something that existed or not, I can find no evidence of it on GE's website or in the inventory system. If it were still being produced or existed to begin with, but we didn't have stock of it, it would still have an entry in the system. I suspect I misremembered an “adjustable white” bulb as something it wasn't.
"Dim-to-warm" was such an important feature when we were recessed light shopping. It's great. In one room, though, we have a ceiling fan light that dims, butndoesnt warm...and it looks so sickly when it's dimmed in comparison.
Finally someone who shares my passion for lighting! I wasted alone of money on bulbs trying to find the right color warmth. Thankyou for being a voice for people like me!
This is the first time I'd ever heard of this LED technology, much less have it explained so clearly and I've been leading the charge of upgrading light bulbs in our house for years going all the way back to the CFL days. And now that you've pointed out how LEDs work vs incandescents, I can't unsee it. Especially since I have two remaining incandescents in my house since they are so beautiful. They are 25W A19 GE bulbs in my kitchen pendant lights and they have been there for 16 years since I have yet to find a technology that really looks like them. Now you say one has been right under my nose and they are about to go away! Time to see if my Orange Store has any left but I'm not getting my hopes up. And since the pendants are now on a Lutron dimmer, I can limit the light output to mimic a 25W bulb or any brightness I choose since a 60W equiv bulb would be too eye searing for the application. And then there are other fixtures in the house that are either on dimmers now or will be soon. Durnit, now instead of looking to replace 2 bulbs, I may have to do a dozen. Added note: I just checked my inventory of old bulbs and I have two 40W clear type incandescents in inventory which means I probably bought them to replace the 25W bulbs since the 25W type was no longer available. So I do have an option when these bulbs finally give up the ghost. But I may still have a hard look at my other bulbs on dimmers (like the dining room) since I’ve never been completely satisfied with the lighting in that chandelier. And my kitchen cans are an LED replacement for incandescents and I didn’t buy them all at once and they all don’t match. It doesn’t look like these types of fixtures are even available by Philips anymore.
If you're looking for 25W incandescents you can still buy them as appliance bulbs. just make sure you get one with the correct base and voltage rating.
I echo pretty much everything you said. When LED bulbs first came out, I pleaded with any LED and bulb manufacturer I came across (I specifically remember talking to reps from CREE and Sylvania) to blend colors and achieve a good facsimile of incandescent lighting. Then Philips did it. I love these bulbs, and so I guess I better go stock up if I can still find them!
LIGHT’s LIKE MUSIC. When given the option to buy Super CD or DVD Audio with amazing sound… nearly everyone chose MP3-128k files that sounded like crap (and SACD, DVD-A died). People just don’t care about quality in music or lighting .
I have 8 Philips 454934 warmglow flood bulbs in my living room since 2015. My wife hates most leds due to the color temp, so I secretly swapped out the incandescent bulbs while she was out. These were the only bulbs she didn't immediately call out as being "unnatural". I never realized they were special "warm glow" bulbs until today. They do use 9.5 watts vs the current 457036 bulb that uses 7.2 watts, but the older version is 100 lumens brighter. Thanks for my tech trivia for the day!
I've been watching your videos for a while, about a year now. And I just have one single thing to say about your videos: they are Great. Your hard work is so valuable, because your reviews include so many levels of analysis like technology, design (and even philosophy sometimes). Congratulations and thanks very much for sharing all your knowledge with the world.
I do have Phillips Hue smart bulbs in my home and have generally been very happy with them, but I completely agree it drives me CRAZY when I go to a place that has mixed color temperature lighting, and I'm always shocked to see it in legit places like stores and businesses.
I do this in my office - one "warm" and one "cool" CFL in the single light fixture. I figured it would illuminate the room with a broader spectrum of light. Is it weird? I thought it was a good idea.
I see people complaining about this, but this seems to make no difference to me regarding comfort. The only annoying part is when I need to check the whiteness or colors of something. But that is solved by going under a cooler color light, and would kinda not be possible if all lights had the same warm bulbs for example.
@@mr22guy Since higher CRI LEDs tend to have more phosphor types in the goo, I also tried this in fixtures with multiple bulbs and indirect or frosted/shaded emitting surfaces. I don’t have any way to measure CRI, so I don’t know how successful I was.
@@mr22guy I do the same for my video recording setup. One cool, one warm. I general much prefer warm (2700K) bulbs, but the color balance on recording is better with multi-spectral lighting.
Something I just realized: Those filament style bulbs are able to hide the entire logic board inside the screw, but the frosted style ones don't. It might have been cheaper at one point to keep building the bigger logic boards, but at some point you'd think economies of scale would kick in and it'd make more sense to only have one type being manufactured in greater numbers. And surely there are some applications where it's aesthetically desirable to have a frosted bulb that emits light all the way around instead of just out the top.
The frosted bulbs mount the LEDs facing up on a PCB that acts as a heatsink. The walls are usually aluminium too making it less likely to fail from overheating
The filament glass bulbs can be either frosted or clear. The electronics of both are hidden in the base, where they are far away from heat produced by LEDs, and are more efficient because they can fit more individual diodes in series. But filament radiation pattern has a dark spot opposite from the base. They don't fit applications where you need a flood light. What they do with some is coat the glass with a mirror old-school style. But exposing the LEDs directly is more efficient.
Well, the tiny logic board has a giant issue IMO, namely the fact there's no smoothing capacitor in every filament I've ever tried which causes them to flicker like crazy.
The filament style should also be able to get away with less circuitry, since there are more smaller LEDs in a higher voltage series circuit, similar to how a string of Christmas lights is able to run directly off the mains with few or no extra components. At 7:20 it looks like there are 22 diodes in one filament, which comes to about 60v, meaning it can run directly off rectified 120v mains voltage.
I couldn't aggree more! I only want warm light too, and as a CRI obsessive photographer, I've resorted to 'special effect' incandescent bulbs. My bedroom's main light is a dimmable 25w 2100K bulb, it turns into a full on cadle when dimmed and I LOVE IT IT'S A BEDROOM NOT A KITCHEN SHOWROOM.
While being probably the most professional and thorough videos on this entire platform, I'm consistently amazed at how watchable this is and how much soul they/you have. Big claps.
I love these types of videos it takes that childhood curiosity and goes just perfectly in depth enough to satisfy the curiosity and feel like I legitimately learn something. The randomness going from dishwashers to gfci to lightbulbs tickles me. Believe it or not a teacher of mine played one of your videos in class I thought that was cool. I think you should appreciate the change big or small you make with these “dumb” little videos. You got a style man, you got a style
Just programmed Home Assistant to make my full-color Philips Wiz bulbs change from the lowest color temperature to the highest along with the brightness. I like the effect, thanks.
And if companies would get off their asses, we could have that effect in any room of any house without any iot shenanigans. I'm blitzing mad about this.
Phillips Hue uses Zigbee. I'm pretty sure my lights responded to the remote even when I was restarting my router for internet issues. I know for sure my lights aren't connected to the internet. As far as I've read, it's even possible to get Phillips Hue bulbs without the bridge and set up a Zigbee hub on a Raspberry Pi or something Edit: As much as I like the sun-like schedule I've put my lights on, my favorite feature by far is that I don't need internet for them to work
If there's one thing I love about this channel, is the descriptive titles for the content of the video. Thank you for not going all click-baity with your titles and thumbnails, keep up the great and informative work!
I mean yeah, apart from the fact he didn't realize that Phillips doesn't product, nor sells Phillips Hue bulbs, the Phillips Lighting department was split off the main Phillips company in 2015 and is it's own thing now called Signify, they produce and sell these bulbs, not Phillips. But part of the splitting off process was Phillips allowing Signify to keep using the Phillips brand, cause else their independence would quickly end in bankruptcy, cause the Phillips brand does mean something.
Smartphone-centric smart bulbs only have a very niche actual use. Like if you own a building with a 1950s marquee and want to change the color for holidays without rewiring, or like at my last job we had philips hue bulbs set up so they'd go red any time a contractor was in the office who wasn't disclosed on what product we were making, thus helping people keep the secret. But other than those instances, I loath the over-pushing over philips hue bulbs onto consumers. I think it is a waste of technology and a waste of data bandwidth. If they sold an entirely internet-free and smartphone-free bulb remote or programmer, I'd feel better about it, but they really dont to my liking. Light bulbs don't need a mac address!
I disagree. Those smart bulbs are rather nice if you know how to use them (not only with a smartphone, but mainly with smart switches / panels). However I agree if you just need light they are overcomplicated. One thing however that is great at least right now is that they are still engineered to last. I have never had a smart bulb failing, they seem to underrun the LEDs.
Philips Wiz (exclusive to Home Depot) has a Wiz Remote option to use instead of a smartphone. I believe they still need to connect to internet to setup.
Hue is Bluetooth or Zigbee+local bridge control, with cloud access being opt-in. Sure, you still need a smartphone at least to pair the lights to the bridge, but they're _not_ internet-connected.
@@NozomiShinobuCrest That would be Hue. It's actually Zigbee, not Z-Wave, which is also an open protocol, and it doesn't have any special encryption, it just is Zigbee. Plenty of ways out there to control those (in fact, the switches that TC showed in this video are a popular option, because they're one of very few models out there that let you separate the buttons on the front panel from the internal dimmer/relay, allowing you to use the buttons as a control input, while leaving the power to the smart bulb live when you hit the "off" button). Wiz, on the other hand, is frustratingly Bluetooth, which doesn't play nice with much of anything.
Used to have some of these in my living room. They are great. I was actually looking for them earlier this year and couldn't find them and this answers why. I'm actually using a mixture of conventional dimmable LEDs like these on smart switches and smart bulbs in rooms that I do want to have finer control over colour temperature. (I use cool light in my office during the day to help focus and switch to warm light when at the end of the day on a fixed schedule) I kinda agree with you that it's much better if the logic lived in the switches as opposed on the lights and kinda wish the industry standardised on a protocol to allow smart switches to configure smart lights without requiring expensive hardware on the bulbs themselves. It should be possible though getting these industries to agree on standards especially when vendor lock-in is so lucrative is a different matter entirely.
I've actually got those Sylvania ones in my basement. At first I bought them right after I bought my house because the basement had like 15 120 watt bulbs in there. Then I remembered they were dimmable and decided to install a dimmer switch and they are really pretty nice. My basement came with the 70's wood paneling and some crazy neat carpet in it and keeping it dimmed just above full off makes it a very cozy space.
I'm one of those people that that mixes both daylight and warm LED lighting, but I do it very intentionally. I used to do theatrical lighting and a common technique is to have a warmer filter on the left lights a cooler one on the right. Faces on stage, especially with brighter lighting, tend to get their features washed/flattened out. One way to compensate for this is to use exaggerated makeup. But another way of helping to correct this is to have warm on one side and cool on the other. I always liked the effect and even the different colored shadows. It seems more interesting and dynamic to me (but maybe it's just nostalgia). So when lighting a room I tend to put warm on one side and cool on the other or warm for the direct lighting and cool for the indirect. P.S. I love Technology Connections because here, at last, is someone as picky and quirky as I am.
In the 6 houses I've lived in, I can only remember one room ever having a dimmer switch, and it NEVER got used. Although, I do have smart bulbs in all my lamps, and I use the dimming function all the time, especially when I'm watching TV. I, for the most part, have a preference for warmer bulbs, with two exceptions. In the kitchen and office I have daylight balanced bulbs, because I find it easier to concentrate with a cooler light. Oh, and in the bathroom I have Cool White lights, not because I chose them, but because I ordered warm lights, got sent cool (not even daylight), and when I complained they just refunded me. So, rather than letting them go to waste I just put them up, and I must admit I do quite like the perceived brightness!
I prefer cool lights in the bathroom, you need to see stuff. I think the kitchen is also a good place for the same reason but I also have smart bulbs most places and they're warm and warm is nicer. I'm the same way too where I started dimming or brightening all the time to fit the situation when I got smart lights.
The only house I know with dimmer switches is my uncle's. I once housesit there for a month and only used the dimmers once before just using them as binary on/off switches. Honestly even with the two "smart" bulbs I have I only extremely rarely care to lower their brightness befause there's very few situations where I would want that over having them off completely, usually whatever I initially set up is what I found comfortable for regular use. Also I like warm lights but definitely as a "novelty". In a kitchen warm lights make things look gross, worse in the bathroom. In my bedroom I use one of those smart bulbs to switch from orange to white to pink, white if I want to focus, orange/pink-white for mood setting if doing anything else
I always grew up in homes with a dimmer switch on the dining room light and in some dens/TV rooms. But otherwise we tended to not have dimmers. Most lights were still either on or off, or some lamps were 3-stage (usually with 50-100-150 W bulbs in them). As for color temperature, I tend to prefer warm-white for indoor lighting. Though I don't mind different fixtures being different too much, especially at opposite ends of a room.* * Heck, my brother's kitchen has a big backlit clock with very white bulbs in it, that do _not_ match the warmer-colored bulbs over the dining table. But it's fine to me, since it's at the other end of the room, and the whiter bulbs go well with the very white clock face.
Yessss!!!!! Yes! yES! You are so 100% correct on this. I have been a fan of these Philips warm glow lights since about 9 years ago. And I noticed I can't find them anywhere. They want you to upgrade to their BS stupid smart lights because they have more profit.
It's fascinating that incandescent bulbs are still legal in the US. I had my whole studio in London equipped with these Phillips ones and I loved them! It would be so cool to have them now living in LA.
@@lukastemberger They decommissioned most nuclear plants and have just now started bringing coal back online due to shortage of natural gas. France are the cool ones keeping up their nuclear power.
It always kinda bites when something you like gets discontinued, but my favorite bulb's manufacturer straight up went out of business. Now I gotta start trying new bulbs again. It was nothing special. Just a 3000K bulb but it most closely replicated the color and light output of my favorite incandescent bulbs. Most others were either slightly too warm or too cool and slightly too dim (none were ever too bright). Also, we bought a pile of their shop lights to light our basement/garage. If any go bad, well..... I just gotta pick something else.
Absolutely fantastic video, as usual. I learned something, was never bored, and I appreciate the time and effort that had to go into making this kind of content. Well done.
Home Depot has a bunch of new Philips warm glow SKUs in stock on their website. They have "ultra definition" in the name and a CRI of 95. The previous warm glow iteration seems to have a CRI of 90.
Daylight balanced bulbs is great for the bedroom, actually. I have some bright smart bulbs that fade in the last half an hour before I have to get out of bed. Waking to a bright, daylight balanced room really does help signal to my brain that it's time to get up. Especially in winter, when there's no daylight outside. In the evening I've set them to grow warmer, though.
Yeah, there's a lot of lighting situations like that where they're nice. Personally, I have mixed warm/cool bulbs in my overhead bedroom light, and use some strip-lighting to provide different temps for late evening. A nice fire-orange, or pink, even just flat red is just fine to see your way into bed by. Or, out to the bathroom once you're all cozy, too.
This is actually the perfect use case for either something like the warm glow effect, or smart lighting. The cool white is great for waking you up.... whether it's morning or night. At night, warm white causes the brain to relax more, ahead of sleep, and cool white should absolutely be avoided (that's precisely what the whole "blue light" trend is about). These solutions let you have the best of both worlds.
Philips sold its lighting division a few good years ago. At the moment, "Philips Hue" and "Philips" bulbs are actually produced by different companies that own the names
Incorrect... Philips spun off its lighting division (which includes the Hue brand) as a separate company, which later became Signify. Quoth the Wiki: "In September 2014, Philips announced that the company intended to demerge the company into two market-leading entities, one focused on health and medical technology and the other on connected LED lighting solutions.[2] On 3 May 2016, Philips announced the formation of the separated company called Philips Lighting N.V.. Philips stated that the main reason for the demerger was that the medical technology business accounted for more than 40% of sales, while its lighting solutions arm remained a major money-spinner, selling products in 180 countries.[3] The separated entity had an initial public offering on 27 May 2016, valued at $3.4 billion; 25% of the shares were offered. The company listed on Euronext Amsterdam under ticker code "LIGHT".[4] In March 2018, Philips Lighting announced that the company would change its name to Signify, which became effective on 16 May 2018. However, Signify continued to produce some of its lighting products under the Philips brand.[5][6] On 16 April 2019, Signify acquired the Hong Kong-based Wi-Fi connected lighting solutions provider, WiZ Connected, for an undisclosed amount.[7] On 2 March 2020, Eaton sold its lighting business, Cooper Lighting Solutions, to Signify for USD 1.4 billion.[8] On 20 December 2021, Signify announced it has entered a final agreement with ams Osram to acquire Fluence for USD 272 million, subject to regulatory approvals.[9]"
I totally get it, while I did have to go the smart bulb route way in the beginning (when they were still $50 a pop, ugh) due to renting with basically no switched outlets and not great natural daylight coverage, I would take warm all the time if I had no other choice. Warm bulbs during the day is ok, but daylight color at night is intolerable, I have some friends with that and I can't figure out how they live with it. Got that homey "hospital waiting room" feel
Which is precisely why I love the daylight colour ones. They feel brighter, they keep me more awake(ish) and they are generally more useful for tasks where seeing colours is important
my colour temperatures differ per room although my house is quite open so the kitchen is conected to the living room. yet the kitchen has 4000k bright white while the living room has a cosy 2200k (and the dining area 2700) so its mostly depend on the funktion of the room rather than how it looks bedrooms and the living room are soft warm while technical rooms are bright white. halways are a bit warmer white than technical rooms but still quite bright. and then there is the bathroom which has two sets of light one super warm and soft and the other bright white because you know baths and shaving/makeup need difrent light though i find the mix of colours somtimes add up nicely to the 80s cyberpunk look of most of my electra
Good stuff Alec. I've never bought a single smart bulb, I always thought the smarts should be in the switches and outlets. About half the switches in my house are dimmable and the only place I'd put a 5000K bulb is in the garage. One beef I've had with CFLs and now LEDs is that they often fail long before they should. Another trend in LED lighting is fixtures with LEDs built in, if the LED fails you must replace the whole fixture, that should be illegal.
The fixtures do have better heatsinking though, and so tend to last a lot longer. Definitely an annoying design when they do eventually start to die, though.
Oh no! After trying every LED bulb at Lowes and Home Depot, I used Philips Warm Glow to replace every bulb in my house. They were the only ones that looked decent. It would be such a loss if these go away. Also, they work great with Lutron Caseta smart dimmers.
Agree with all of this. Have loved the warm glow bulbs for years. Super sad to hear this :( Most of the time I do not need or want individual smart blubs.
Damn! I moved into a new house and had issues with LED's flickering on a dimmer switch circuit. I thought it was a fixture issue. The switch itself makes so much more sense. Thank you!
Yeah, that's just how LEDs were originally. The bulbs I bought 6 years ago still work, but I replaced them with these and it's incredible. I actually use my dimmer now! Lol
While I appreciate your desire to get dimming which works just like incandescent (something I didn't even realize even existed in LED form other than the adjustable color temp smart bulbs you mentioned), I'm actually the opposite. I *like* the fact that LEDs can maintain a fairly consistent color temperature at multiple brightness levels. I *hated* how incandescents would get entirely too warm in color as they were dimmed. I have a favorite color temp (3000K because 2700 is too yellowy and 4000 is too white), and I like having that temperature regardless of how bright the bulb is. But that's also what's great about LEDs... these sorts of things are actually possible.
It also makes it easier on the other complaint he had on the lights not being the same... Well, if you use all LED, it's a lot easier to do just that for the simpletons of the world who just want lights that work.
First time I'm hearing about this and sad to hear that they're taking these away before I could even get them... I know EXACTLY what you're saying about the dimmers WOW! I wished I knew about this option. Grrrrr....
A decade ago I was at CES and spoke with a vendor who was showing color-controllable LED bulbs. I asked him if they made a bulb that would change color as it was dimmed, and he asked why would I want that. "Because incandescents do that." This is the first I'm hearing of an actual implementation. Also a decade ago, I had a major kitchen renovation and installed dimmers on everything. I saw incandescent bulbs being outlawed, so I stocked up. The dimmers limit the power to a max of about 85%, so after a dozen years I have only replaced one of 12 bulbs.
OMG THANK YOU!! I thought I was going crazy when I swapped out my switch for a dimmer. I noticed same day that my kitchen seemed dimmer and dug into a rabbit hole to find out why, and saw the DOE publication with that exact 85% number. I'm fairly certain they do this artififically to cover the 15% of energy that is dissipated in the triac. Hypothetically, would you be interested in a dimmer that got to the full 100% instead of 85%? The other downside with 85% is some lamps have an audible buzz since they never revive the full unchopped waveform. Downside of 100% is not under driving your lamps to save life. Though the down side of under driving is lower efficacy. I'm quite conflicted in this, but may be working on a 100% dimmer and floating around whether it's worth fully building out.
These are really sweet, I loved these bulbs. Other than the warm glow, they also have a really wide dimming range (as you mentioned, you can make them barely glow) and have no flicker. Another thing, I find newer Sylvania LED bulbs to be utter garbage.
I do a lot of lighting related things in my job, and I've had the color temperature discussion with many customers. People are clueless about color temperature, generally. And even some people who understand don't care at all. I know that seems crazy to those of us who watch this video, but it's true. That's why better light bulbs seem to be a pipe dream
yeah, to be honest I am the kind who doesn't care but this video got me thinking that the shiny white bulb in my bedroom may be why I don't like having it on
Philips do can lights that perfectly warm when dimmed at night and are bright and cool at 100% but you can also choose to just keep it warm or cool. They’re the smart bulbs though. Having a smart switch rather than bulbs makes more sense in most ways, but I also just really wanted warming bulbs so that’s what I went with. We’ll see when matter finally launches
Whew, great looking switch at the 13:36 mark (on the right that is haha)! Kidding aside, great video and I completely agree with the part around Z-Wave/Zigbee (mostly Z-Wave) needing to do a better job communicating what it is the protocol can do and that hubs aren't necessarily bad at all. Keep up the great work and thanks for the support! Eric Founder | Inovelli
I live in CA, where it has been hard to get these bulbs thanks to regulations regarding the CRI of LED bulbs, but recently, Walmart has started stocking these bulbs, so you may want to check them for these bulbs now. Also in California, Home Depot has stopped selling almost all Philips lighting products, opting to instead sell a mix of Feit Electric and Sylvania products, so I wonder if that change is starting to make its way nationwide. Also, by the end of this year, it will no longer be possible to buy most incandescent and halogen bulbs (that were not already banned), meaning either you have to stock up (if you like using those bulbs), or find replacements (like the Philips LEDs discussed in this video).
How did I not know these exist? This is exactly what I've always wanted! Maybe a shift on all dimmable levels to the warmer side by just a bit, then I'd be in heaven.
I also didn't know these existed. I could have sworn I saw Philips light bulbs with very similar branding, but I didn't know they performed in this way!
I have these bulbs and love them because they looked the most like an incandescent, a couple years ago. However, i don't dim my lights and never realized that dimming was what made these so special. I suspect that, due to product shortages, and there being a lot of people like me, this may mean an accelerated end date to a great product.
Hey everyone, very interesting technology indeed! Another cool idea is dimming without the need for a dimming switch. I have some LED-Bulbs which start at full brightness when turned on. Then you can double-click the switch (off-on) and the brightness is slowly lowered until minimum. Another double-click starts the slow increase of brightness. While dimming up oder dimming down, you can use a double-click to stop at the desired brightness. The ultimate lightbulb I have uses this function combined with dim-to-warm! So you can dim, the colour temperature behaves similar to an incandescend bulb and you don't need a dimming switch! That's neat!
Protip: If you have to ask yourself "Is [company] discontinuing [really good product that isn't literally their flagship]?" the answer is always yes. edit: oops, dropped my ]
Two local Fry's stores still had these in stock just about a week ago, I definitely remember seeing the filament-style one recently. I never really looked into what the feature was, I assumed it was just to mimic the aesthetic of an incandescent bulb, didn't realize it also behaved differently from a regular LED bulb.
I didn't know I needed these. I have a bunch of recessed downlights (new construction) that have that uncomfortable effect when dimmed. I did find some replacements that are branded as "EyeComfort" that claim to go "from 2700K down to a soft glow". Maybe they're going to repackage these warm glow lights with different branding? Either way, thanks for highlighting these!
"Cozy," is the best description that I can use to describe incandescent light also. Incandescent light best represents the glow of light from a fire or flame, it's primal. I think it was one of the Survivor TV shows when they were in the Australian Outback when one of the survivors (Cody?) likened a campfire as the Outback television. Over a decade ago when I lived in San Diego, CA, there was a Denny's restaurant in Pacific Beach that changed all of its lights to that bright blueish daylight temperature of ~5000K. It was probably fine during the daylight hours, but when I drove by that place at night it stood out like a sore thumb and gave me a nauseous feeling. Almost like walking into a sterile facility, or into a human sized bug zapper with its blueish-greenish-violet death light. Working in video production in the 90's taught me something about color temperatures and the importance of white balancing a camera and making someone's flesh tones look correct. Sometimes it was a battle when there were mixes of daylight (blue hue), fluorescent (green hue), and incandescent (orange hue) lighting in a shot. Enjoy every photon.
I feel this. The last time I was buying light bulbs, I felt overwhelmed. A lightbulb used to be a light bulb for the most part. Most people only needed to decide between wattage and sometimes single or three way bulbs. Occasionally you needed something special for a fixture, or maybe you wanted a party light. As far as incandescent lighting was concerned, choices were fairly simple and straightforward. Not anymore. It just seems needlessly complicated now, especially smart lighting. Does everything need to connect to the Internet and a smart phone? It used to be that you bought a bulb and screwed it in -- done! A lot of appliances used to be simpler to use, very intuitive. As interesting as innovation can be, I miss how easy it was to navigate things in the past. Modern tech has added layers of complexity that really don't need to be there, and it's become so ubiquitous that it's becoming harder to opt out. I'm with you, by the way, on hating mixed temperature lamps together. *shudders* I can't stand that! I'm all for warm lighting. I've always hated fluorescent lighting because of its cold, blue glow, especially from cheap fixtures that also had flickering, buzzing bulbs. Even now, nothing truly yet beats an old-fashioned light bulb. I just want it that simple, and I see no reason why that shouldn't be an option. Sigh...
My local store recently introduced 95CRI (they call it “Ultra Definition”) version of the warm glow dimmable bulbs from Philips. Could it be that they were getting rid of the “Shows natural colours 90CRI” bulbs?
@Les You mean incandescents? Yes, the color is nice, but they're incredibly inefficient. When I converted my mom's house to CFLs almost 30 years ago, her electricity bill fell by about 25%.
I got a notification for a reply that said this: "I think your missing the point - the "Ultra Definition" doesn't get 'warmer' as you dim it" except I can't find it. The "Warm white" version does advertise as "warm glow" as well.
I love everything about color temperature, especially shifting color temps as the day goes on. It always sucks when something you love gets discontinued for lack of appreciation.
It's funny, I actually stripped all the dimmer switches out of my rental flat soon after I moved in because they annoyed the hell out of me. I prefer a nice clicky switch.
I tried one of those warm glow bulbs, and I found it to be really intolerant of power line fluctuations. Turning on my amplifier or a vacuum cleaner would cause a huge dip in brightness.
@@ingulari3977 The warm glow bulbs didn't dim in response to fluctuations like an incandescent bulb does, and it was worse than the GE LED bulbs I usually use. The dip in brightness was quite sharp.
that happens to any power connected source. it just gets hidden if there is an inductor or capacitor in the circuit because they store and discharge energy to cover the gap
I found some of these bulbs at a target near me (WI), so they are still being made and likely in stock near you, they’re even the clear bulb style with the very-much-better ballast design that uses the socket and wiring as a heat sink and stuff. My dad was looking for orange and purple bulbs for Halloween and what not and I saw the warm glow packaging and almost audibly gasped and thought, “hey, technology connections said these are great but also hey they’re still in stock” so I bought 3 boxes, and I must concur, they are great
Patrons of the channel have uncovered some more info which... makes the future look less bright. It looks like Home Depot is indeed no longer going to stock these in-store and is clearancing out what remains. Whether they'll continue to sell them online is unclear.
Confounding things, these aren't state-of-the-art when it comes to their efficiency. I mean, it's still very good if you ask me! Near 100 lumens per watt, but they're eclipsed by newer bulbs. In markets which rate bulbs by their efficiency these look worse compared to their peers.
There's also some speculation that these don't meet certain regulatory requirements for light quality. That I'm unsure of because the rated CRI of the product line varies, with many achieving 90.
In any case, I would think Philips could update this product line to be more efficient and meet whatever other requirements might be needed, but I'm afraid there's little reason for them to do it. Kicking and scream I shall be, a little bit.
Brother, I also have a Philips story and full-well know the pain of losing access to bulbs that you love. However, in a twist, this one was not due to a decision by Philips!
A few years ago CA passed a law banning the sale/import of all bulbs that were not on a specific "approved" list maintained by the state. This meant that store shelves had a very barren selection of bulbs with limited color and size/base options. Doing online research I found a perfect Philips LED replacement to my lamps that actually met state criteria, but because it was not yet on the import list I could not buy it via Amazon or other major retailers.
So I had to resort to the only thing you can do when faced with a product ban: smuggling. I knew that a friend would be returning from AZ soon so I asked him to bring me a box of these bulbs so I'd have plenty to last me many years into the future regardless of how laws might change.
Regulatory light quality (I presume less blue light) would be originating from the EU. If you would like these bulbs to continue, there needs to be a way to repair them or perhaps have an open source design. I too find internet enabled options troublesome for a number of reasons. Besides handing control over to another party data mining on personal subjects/choices is becoming much more pervasive. Major corporations are starting to want to track how you vote.
@@metatechnologist Lightbulbs are simple enough devices that an open-source design could potentially be made.
Do a video about why we get the B stuff of led lamps? th-cam.com/video/klaJqofCsu4/w-d-xo.html
Since people are mostly anything but smart, the industry will certainly proceed to take away the real smart products and replace them with products that have smart in their name. You better stock up some more!
As an assistant manager at a hotel, I have been trying to explain this color light thing to the engineers and upper management, telling them to buy, at the very least, the same light temperature for all the bulbs and not mix them in the room. To this day, they still don't get it when one bulb in a dual fixture is a bright white and the other is a soft orange-red.
@Banter Maestro2 Definitely less educated in paying attention to details.
There's a reason why they are management, and not you, and qualifications/intelligence, sure ain't the reason why...
Huh. I actually deliberately mix the color of light bulbs in my living and working spaces. It feels more like sunlight than just the "daylight" cool color bulbs alone.
LOL one room I rented (a Microtel I think?) had a bedside lamp with one warm and one cool bulb in it. It alternated each bulb, then both were on, mimicking 3-way with 2 bulbs. I bet it was a mistake, but I found it a nice feature that I could "control" the color LOL
@@youdontknowme5969 Some family of mine have done that on purpose before, so it may not have been a mistake at all.
I have never encountered another person who has lighting expectations so specific and so aligned with my own.
...although I will add that I am far more against smart devices. I take great comfort in the fact that I am smarter than my house.
LIGHT’s LIKE MUSIC. When given the option to buy Super CD or DVD Audio with amazing sound… nearly everyone chose MP3-128k files that sounded like crap (and SACD, DVD-A died). People just don’t care about quality in music or lighting
.
@@electrictroy2010 There used to be an hour long radio program every weekday at noon called "Jack up the 80s".
well, they still have it, but they stripped it of everything that made it worth listening to.
It used to be an hour of 80s tunes, on vinyl or reel. even over the radio the difference was surreal. the DJ played a lot of B sides and back catalogue stuff too, so there were so many songs that I had never heard before, and even the ones I had heard, even popular songs that are well known and had been chart topping singles, I'd never heard the original analogue recordings. The first time I heard Janey's Got a Gun on that show my mind was blown. I never noticed the drum in the intro is supposed to be a gun shot, it doesn't pop in the digital remaster like it does on vinyl.
"easy lover" is also a lot easier to listen to.
either way, my work day would come to a grinding halt and that hour was spent glued to the radio.
then they changed it and it's just an hour of the same 80s tunes you hear any other time you listen to songs from that decade, and the guy hosting is just a generic talking head.
but also yes, listening to high quality digital recordings is absolutely worth it. I don't see how people can't appreciate the experience... or how they can not value it enough to even keep what they have for physical media.
L. O. V. E. is what that is 😉
Same
Technology Connections is how every older person sounded like an expert when I was age four.
So awesome to see you here! I love that you love this channel lol
CHOCOLATE RAIN
I will never buy "smart light bulbs"
"We know a few things, 'cause we've seen a few things."
Chocolate rain homie right under deviant ollam, i feel like im in good company.
My mans really went and bought a lifetime supply of a light bulb he really likes that is likely going out of production. Respect.
With LED lifespan probably more than a lifespan...
Learn English
These lamps were my saving grace when I was tasked with converting our historic theatre’s chandelier and house lights from tungsten to LED. Over 250 of them. The warm shift was a must for me, and they look gorgeous in our theatre. Sad to hear, and a bit worried once replacements begin to become needed.. Time to stock up!
You're doing a very valuable job. It's thanks to you that the task didn't get assigned to someone who's not worth their salt as a lighting coordinator who would probably just replace all the lights with an obnoxious blue hue.
derek phillips has a massive array of dimtones on amazon ,they just changed the loo of the bulb to a crystal lens instead of filament style
This video made me wonder why I haven't yet seen an LED theatrical lighting fixture with this temperature shift. Do you know of any?
I mean, it's not too hard to program this on the console, but I can certainly see some advantages of having it built into the fixtures. There is never enough tech time, so if having a Dynamic White (or whatever they want to call it) mode would save even a few minutes of programming time on any given day I'm sure a lot of venues would love it!
Theatres, fine. But why should anyone ever need a dimmable lamp at home? To me, it's almost as incomprehensible as air conditioning.
@@NealMiskinMusic the reason is the following: We used to dimm down for cto effect. We needed more lighs for the same or even enough light on stage. Its way more easy to just controlle ct on its own so if you want a different ct and touch the intensity if you want less brightness. The alternative would be dealing with a arbitrary dim/ct curve and more lights.
In addition with Camaras being often a part of the equation you do want intensity independent stable color temperature. Greeting
increasingly this channel feels like 'old man yells at clouds', where Alec is the old man and the clouds are his favorite bits of electronics.
It's good. I like the channel.
Sometimes you just gotta step up and be that old man when no-one else will.
everything good is always being taken away from us..
Old man yells at The Cloud
I had one of these fail on me a couple years ago - it was the clear globe version with the "edison filament". I called Phillips, thinking they would stand behind their product. They actually told me that they wouldn't replace it because I did not use an approved dimmer. Turns out, they didn't have any approved dimmer for the bulb and I was out of luck and I should not use the bulbs with a dimmer. Funny huh? Even the person on the phone sounded confused.
What, I also have a hue bulb, but mine is "smart" so has Bluetooth connection and an inbuild dimmer, was this the case with you too, or did you use a manual dimmer?
I've had a billion of these fail. I'm happy to see this model go. It's garbage.
@@PurdueRy I have a hue lamp, and it hasn't died in 4 years so it's doing great
@@TEAserOne yeah the hue are a different animal entirely. I love Philips bulbs otherwise. The best one I’ve found lately is only sold in Canada and has 3000K temperature which is my preferred for kitchens and bathrooms. So far no reliability issues there crossing my fingers.
@@Ryan-di5zo Yeah I don't own a Phliips Hue bulb, well I do, but that's just the Branding, all "Phillips" bulbs produced after 2015 aren't actually produced by Phillips anymore but by the company Signify that is basically the old Phillips Lighting department but it became it''s own thing.
Hey, in case these do get discontinued, IKEA seems to make high quality LED bulbs with the same effect under their "Ledare" line. They call it warm dimming so look out for that if you ever run out of these!
Edit: looks like these are getting discontinued too. Why, IKEA?!
Hopefully the Swedes will save this cool bulb design!
For anyone in the UK, Tesco has philips WarmGlow stuff listed on their site.
I have had two ikea "trådfri" (which means wire-free btw) bulbs fail within a year hopefully their "ledare" (which mean conductor btw) bulbs are better. I gave up with their smart bulbs and just bought a normal non dimmable led bulb for my room. (Which has worked great)
The longest lasting LED bulb I’ve ever had within an IKEA bulb in one of those articulating desk lamps. I had several of them mounted along the back wall of my woodworking bench so that I could positioning at any place when carving, which often needs like to be cast in strange and odd ways to help show the details of the work. That shop didn’t have air-conditioning either and I had several of those on pretty much 23 hours a day for six years and none of them blew.
@@hullinstruments Agreed. I've had several IKEA LED bulbs for that I've been using for 6+ years and not a single one has died on my yet. It's possible their smart bulbs are worse quality, but I don't care for smart bulbs anyway.
"Hue did this!" The best joke of the skit.
excellent taste in movies too.
I felt that "Faren-hot" was also a good pun.
I'm partial to the Matter joke about the smart home market changing
Agreed. Made me want to share it with my family. But then I realized I’d be bullied for being a nerd 🤓
Hue the Borg Drone?
As someone who runs an electrical department at a unnamed orange store, I can say that i still have some stock of those. On clearance.
Nooooo!!!
Why does the orange store not have a name? I’m out of the loop.
@Frank Dux I know what the store is, he says it in the video a few times. I want to know why it is “unnamed”
@@bjs242 Because the guy just thinks he's being clever that's all.
@@bjs242 kinda unlikely but companies can sue you if you talk abt ur brand badly (in the USA at least). Fucked but if the guy works there probably just protecting himself
The endings of these videos are always my favorite, not because of the blooper reel (though those are great in their own right), but because of the captions afterward. Every video is a joy to experience. Thank you for continuing to make them.
How have I never known this?!?!
Anytime TC is mentioned on some other channel, I always recommend they watch it with the closed captions on, and that they watch to the very end.
So many videos I didn't know
Well at least I have a reason to rewatch them
I simply love the work put into the captions. It adds a certain flair that I've never seen done before, and it is brilliant!
also, the humor is great. I've seen several videos with little bits in the middle of the videos as well on the captions.
You surrounded by possibly discontinued light bulbs is a nice way to summarize your passion for lighting
@Don't Read My Profile Photo I won't
@@LUNA-fx2ud Nooo the bots are here
@@ChristophHoward because they think "Technology Connections" is a dating site...?
@@ChristophHoward Don't interact with the bots. It makes them look less like bots to the already shit TH-cam aL90R!+h!m.
@@ej_tech Fair enough, still I try to leave a comment for any people who are dumb enough to fall for those comments.
"Four thousand four hundred Faren-hot" is some perfect punning.
Farenhot had rewritten my brain. I'll never not use this.
have you ever hated someone so profoundly but also felt mad respect for them at the same time?
that's the kind of pun that was.
I would expect no less
Hmm, Fahrenhot 451! I wonder if you get your fingers burnt for reading the instructions?
The master punster strikes again, Farenhot is my new fav word
We use a lot of these bulbs at Disney theme parks. We have a lot of “lanterns” around the park that flicker and dim to simulate a flame. These are the closest we’ve found to simulating a classic incandescent look. Hopefully they don’t get discontinued.
Maybe disney can be the reason why they arent discontinued
the one good thing disney would be good for
You know they have LED "flame" bulbs, right? I put one in the pole light in front of my in-laws' house as a joke, thinking it would be funny for a while and then the bulb would die. To my surprise, it looks pretty cool and it's been going strong for 2 years+... outside. Go check them out. Though I'm kinda shocked Disney wouldn't have a better version of the bulb I just described already.
Do you know Loyal P. in imagineering?
@@MrEazyE357 Yes. The most realistic lantern simulation is typically an incandescent lamp programmed to flicker subtly. The flame bulbs are fun, but not at all realistic in terms of color accuracy and animation.
That being said - they aren’t dedicated enough to spend the money to have a custom developed bulb for this purpose. At least, not yet.
Man oh man I hear ya! And agree 100%! My recent struggle was finding LED under-cabinet lighting that I could dim to a warm hue, but there seems to be nothing available. However, I did discover what is called "dim to warm" LED tape that is constructed exactly the same as the Philips bulbs--a white LED paired with an amber one. And it doesn't need a controller. It isn't cheap, and I now need to assemble all my under-cabinet lighting from parts. But for those of us who really want that warm glow at low levels, it's worth it!
17:05 And through the magic of buying ALL OF THEM…
Great video Alec, very interesting. I still live with my parents (I’m almost done with college) and I always just use whatever bulbs they have lying around. I will say one issue with smart bulbs that are connected to the internet. Last month, my house was struck by lightning and it took out the internet for a day or so. My brother has smart bulbs in his room connected to his echo dot. Because the internet was out, he couldn’t turn his lights on because he used he Alexa to turn them off the night before and not the switch. Honestly it would have been worse if they got stuck on like red or blue or something like that. His room is also in the basement and so doesn’t get much natural light.
Also, now that I know about them, I actually like the idea of daylight balanced bulb. I’m studying software engineering and spend a lot of time working indoors. I like bright white light bulbs personally because it makes the room very bright and almost like sunlight, making it feel like a beautiful summer day, but also find it a little too obnoxiously bright at night. These sound like a perfect solution for my preferences.
I still can't wrap my head around the idiocy of internet light bulbs. Internet dropouts happen. Quite frequently in some places. Selling a utility as essential as indoor lighting with such a massive flaw as being rendered inoperable during an outage seems like a big scam to get people buying more light bulbs.
That would be why there was the recommendation to use something like zigbee with a bridge, you don't need the wider Internet to control your lights then, just local power.
Also some smart lights will reset to factory defaults if you flick them on and off a few times, not ideal as you'll have to reconfigure them afterwards, but at least you can have light.
If you use something that only uses the local network to control your lighting (homeassistant for instance), you won't need an internet connection even with internet connected bulbs. I have a Sonoff SV based light (that's internet connected) that works just fine without an internet connection, it can even be controlled by my google home over LAN. That being said though, mesh networks like z-wave or matter are still superior for other reasons.
@@ViciousVinnyD Not so much buying more light bulbs as buying more expensive light bulbs. Sure you may be throwing away a bit of usable life in your old bulbs (if you're doing it all at once on an existing fixture) but I would hope these new bulbs have a comparable life expectancy to the one you're getting rid of. The smart bulbs are just more expensive. I think in general smart bulbs are dumb because why are you intentionally building the smart part into something that is disposable?
LIFX have (had?) a contingency in place for a situation like this. If you power cycle them twice with a deliberate gap, they reset their color and lumen to a default bright white.
Hue may have something similar. Maybe Nanoleaf too.
We hope that you feel the same warmth from all of us that you do from these lovely old-timey-lookin' bulbs... please don't feel any pressure over when your next video is coming, and you never have to worry about us forgetting you in our feeds whenever there's some lag between releases. This video is charming and now if you'll pardon me I have to get to the store for..... reasons. 💡😊
P.S. - You win classy person points for the Knives Out reference. 😁
Hope you got some help for your TDS. (Tips hat)
I swear the pleasant surprise of seeing you in the comments here will never get old, hope you're doing well
this is why i am glad dev isnt in the same state as me, im already competing with alec for rare lightbulbs, dont think i can even still buy the remote phosphor led bulbs locally anymore, i lucked out finding 1 recently in a box of old stuff!
In before you find your way into a site's network via the lighting....
I will NEVER buy a light bulb that needs a phone. Ain't gonna happen. . It's a light bulb. The only reason they are doing this is to get into your phone. I would rather sit in the dark.
2 things (among many) that I like about your presentations: You write your own closed captions!! Damn I wish more people would do that. And, your creativity with the English language. It's always an improvement when you make up a word. Sometimes they're so good I stop and say, "Wait ... "
True. The CC stuff especially annoys me if people are already reading off a script and still don't provide subtitles. Like, you have it typed out already, and there is software that will sync the CC to the video
Absolutely agree on the subs. I watched a video on the history of subtitles, and it went over how TV broadcasts have to have them (in the US, not sure about other countries) and I never realized that accessibility was something we lost in the internet video rush. So many channels I watch don't have them and it's frustrating. probably more frustrating for people who actually need them for various reasons
@@Dying_Of_Thirst Subtitles and audio description are required on UK TV channels.
Subs are good for being subs.
Subs on TH-cam are bad because they feed the algorithm monster than will recognize speech much better in the future to ban disobedient speakers.
The other problem as someone who likes to remodel and update homes, is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find fixtures that even use replaceable bulbs, especially when trying to go for a specific style. This makes it really great when the led malfunctions and you now have to replace the entire fixture.
Did you predict his video about led fixtures?..
I specifically only go for ES fixtures
I had no idea these existed… Such a shame they’re hard to find now.
When I was making a concept art of a futuristic apartment I thought about using daylight-balanced ambient lights and warm exposed lights, with the same idea of dimming the cool lights first to make the room warmer as it gets dimmer.
amazon sells loads of phillips glow dimmables ! they just changed the look of them thats all ( in UK they do anyway b22 fixtures )
I love Phillips WarmGlow but I was always worried this would happen. When I try to explain this exact thing to most people they think I'm crazy. Eventually we'll reach a point where nobody remembers bulbs glowing warmer when they dimmed and this feature will become unnecessary. This is bad for me, but most people won't even know the difference.
people nowadays seem to be dumb AF. they know about nothing.
You’re not alone in your quest for warm welcoming LED lighting. As an engineer and an interior designer I feel exactly the same way. I’ve seen daylight bulbs lighting peoples homes and especially their front porches that cast the coldest most ghostly light that is far from being welcoming and it can make thing like paint, fabric and even food look off.
And smart switches over smart bulbs: hell yeah.! We have one smart bulb and are not fans.
Great video 👍🏽
The most-stark differences, seem to be stores that change from long fluorescents to LEDs! The new LEDs, looked bright in a rather strange way! (If not an outright bad way!) I guess that the CRI dropped in many cases, too! Noticed that in a Dollar General in the late-2010s and the same kind of thing in a Shaw's, IIRC. (Also, in the late-2010s, IIRC) It was mostly with the ceiling fluorescents being changed to LEDs.
LIGHT’s LIKE MUSIC. When given the option to buy Super CD or DVD Audio with amazing sound… nearly everyone chose MP3-128k files that sounded like crap (and SACD, DVD-A died). People just don’t care about quality in music or lighting
.
I prefer the warm lighting options too! I hope they don't stop making the warm bulbs. I imagine that anyone who suffers with headaches prefers the warm lighting. That was my main complaint with the new bulbs when all of this started, they were all blaring blue/white light and cold. I prefer the cozy and warm light better, especially when reading a real book on a rainy day. Keep up the great work with your videos!
When I bought this house, it was mentioned that all fixtures had LED lighting.
That was accurate, but they were all mismatched temps. It was agony.
The horror!
Could get the builder to fix. Rentals do this too.
@@Nicholas-f5 it was the previous owner that swapped them all out. I bought this house sight unseen, so I didn't know about it until I moved in.
Mine had led fixtures, but no led dimmer switches. I didn't know, and didn't know to check.
Now mine mine has replaceable bulb fixtures with led compatible dimmers after the fixtures decided to have a disco party.
I had the same problem. Are they just bulbs, tho? Can you swap them out? I only had one that I don't think I can swap (a daylight LED above the sink), so I just swapped out the bulbs in the kitchen's main light fixture to be daylight as well. Looks SO much better. I went and took every bulb out of every fixture, and re-installed them to make sense. Had to buy some as well, since there were no dimmable WARM bulbs. I bought the ones in this video!
I worked at Home Depot for eight years stocking shelves before escaping last autumn. I was the guy who knew the electrical department better than anyone else on my crew. I can't speak for this particular product, but I can say there was an *absurd* amount of product turnover, increasingly so the last few years. We seemed to clearance out the majority of the lighting products roughly three times a year towards the end. As the guy desperately trying to find places to put overstocked clearance items that we had no place to set out for sale, because every single spot to shelf clearance items was being used, I was not a happy camper.
It has worsened since last autumn, and it’s even tougher to find all that clearance space when it’s tile.
I have a friend who was the equivalent at Lowes and it was the same. At one point I bought 10 4-packs of 60w equivalents for a buck each.
my HD has (in my opinion, *too many* ) makeshift displays and even pallets just placed in the wide raceway aisles piled with clearance items... it's getting old and barely no room to walk in some areas...
orange blooded to the core!
Can we give this man an award for “Best Knives Out Reference in a TH-cam Video About Phillips Lighting Products”? I mean, it’s a pretty niche category, but he definitely deserves it.
I had to listen twice to see if I heard him right. 100/10 absolutely perfect reference throw.
What was the reference? I missed it
I am the problem. I love me my hues and nearly choked laughing, tho. :D
@@Raddaya ohh....Hue knows....
@@Raddaya 12:47
It appears Philips has refreshed this line as “Ultra Definition” and still includes the Warm glow effect. I’ve seen this new line sold at Kroger (grocery store).
Edit: Also sold through Walmart.
This is correct. I work at a hardware store and just looked at our order catalog and all the Warm Glow series show discontinued with a replacement link leading to the equivalent Ultra Definition version, which just became available this month.
Home Depots in my area have gone to Feit Electric as their supplier for most of their light bulbs but I can confirm that Philips bulbs are being sold at my closest Walmart
Deep-diving into things, it looks like the thing you really want to look for is "Eye Comfort" which Philips says is "tunable," meaning color temp shifts. Those are also part of the Ultra Definition line but it looks like not all products in Ultra Definition have warm glow (which is fine! I don't want every bulb to be warm glow... I just want to be able to buy warm glow.)
Did a google based on your coment. Seems the Ultra definition bulb come in
-Warm white(2700) or daylight(5000K)
-CRI 95, finally! Hopefully there are no big holes in the specturm.
-RED(R9) = ? couldnt find value yet. The warm-glow series had R9 of 50, and it was not deep-red but the pastel-red we know from
fluorescent tube lighting. Which is most likly the most efficient phosphor in terms of energy efficiency.
-Dimable with that familar "incandescent like" colour-temperature shift
-filament style bulbs
Thank you for posting this!
At the part from 17:01, I lost it and cracked up. Never stop being the particular flavor of maniac you are. I genuinely love your stuff and appreciate your style.
Through the magic of buying... 17+ of them
He is definetly NOT alone on this. I hate when something I like gets discontinued. Thats why I have 4 pairs of my favorite everyday shoes, and 8 computer mice since I finally found a shape I like and can use 8-10 hours a day.
Really? That was the most predictable thing ever :-p
Your videos never disappoint! I get such a nostalgic vibe from your editing, music choice and just every other aspect of the video - it reminds me of watching "How it's made" as a kid. I love the little jokes you insert here and there, they play along with the cozy feeling I get while watching. Thanks for continuing your fantastic work, I really appreciate every upload on this channel as well as connextras!
I’m amazed that every time that I watch a video about a simple subject, this time a light bulb, for 20 minutes, i still learn more then I even expected. Keep it up, your videos are amazing.
Oh, so that's why my memories of childhood are warm and cozy looking. I honestly think if I walked into a room with early '00s lighting I would cry just from the nostalgia and comfort.
I would with monitors and TVs, too! CRTs (a.k.a. "tube") don't have the color and lag issues that LCD screens have. I still have plenty of working incandescents! Because number one, I purchased new-old-stock incandescents in the very-late-2010s. (looks like they were made in 2014, most likely) But it looks like they can outlast cheap LEDs!
I work in electronics R&D and supply issues haven't improved at all since it started. I doubt that is purely the reason they're discontinuing these bulbs, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a large contributor.
Thumbs up for the Amtrak shirt! 🚄 😁
I take it he's not the type to be riding BNSF or CP etc... I could totally see him doing a video on the differences between riding 48' and 53's though. "Riding suicide on the fly!? That's just cray cray."
Loved the shirt as well. Takes me back to 1980 and "America's getting into training"
thumbs up to the magic of buying ALL of them ;)
i am a fan of warmer lighting as well .. but that could just be my eye sensitivity after retinal detachment and cataract surgery.
I'm curious, how old were you when you had the detachment and what caused it? High myope here and have been scared of that happening to me.
@@grayrabbit2211 yep high myopia (-14.0, -13.5) was the main cause at age 42. triggering event on a long weekend monday after i had just pulled a 30 hour poker session. because i had been wearing sunglasses the whole time, i thought the gradual dimming over the hours was just me getting tired, but once i got out into the sunlight the true situation revealed itself. walked home in 5 mins, did a quick google search, called a buddy to drive me over to the hospital ER and the GP confirmed retinal detachment. ambulance to eye specialist intern that night. eye surgeon tuesday morning. surgery to place sclerotic buckle wednesday afternoon. canadian healthcare rocks when it counts. laid up in facedown apparatus chair for 6 weeks off work. 2 years later, as expected cataract surgery (-1.5,-1.5 !!) so i can now officially drive without glasses (though i don't). still some lingering uveitis issues in the affected eye, but both retinas still currently stable 10 years on. your optometrist can keep a lookout, but if you are seriously worried, try to get a referral to an ophthalmologist so you can have a baseline established. feels weird in the waiting room surrounded by folks all 30 years older, but what can you do ?
@@senatorhung Eek. Your #s aren't that far off from where I am. Fortunately no issues yet, but I usually do get an eye exam once a year. The whole lockdown/offices closed/masking crap had gotten in the way of that. Hoping to be able to get an eye exam soon.
Thank you for sharing your experience... I'll definitely be asking many questions at (hopefully) this year's exam.
@@grayrabbit2211 your optometrist can definitely keep a lookout for any eye inflammation or excess ocular pressure. another warning sign is if you get more than the occasional fireworks burst of floaters .. a sign of a possible loose blood vessel at the back of the eye that might induce a detachment if left untreated. as you get older, higher myopia will also stretch your central retina possibly leading to myopic macular degeneration (unlike the 'regular' age-related macular degeneration) and leads to a fuzziness in central vision. not much you can do about that though. there are studies in youngfolk that spending more time outdoors can help slow down increases in myopia (either bright sunlight OR looking longer distances at the horizon - relevant factor still being investigated), but no studies on already myopic adults that i've heard of.
@@senatorhung Optometrists are the leading cause of high myopia. There are a few "rogue" ones which practice myopia reduction out there but they tend to stay quiet, as this goes against the industry (read: $$$)
The focusing mechanism of the eye is just a bunch of muscles. Even in old age, you can still build up muscles. BUT your muscles will never get stronger if you brace (wear glasses) those muscles all the time.
I feel very strongly about warm/soft lighting as well, so much so that I bring warm glow bulbs with me when travelling so I can be comfortable in hotel rooms that are polluted with cold (or worse, cold and flickering) light. I swap them back before I leave, of course.
That’s a great suggestion, I now know what to do when I travel, I will just take some daylight balanced bulbs with me, so I can actually *see* when I’m trying to work in hotel rooms that inexplicably come with only “warm” lighting. (In fairnesses, I’m a cheapskate, so usually stay at the cheapest motels I can find, so most likely the clientele is looking for “romantic” lighting, not functional.)
Perhaps in an ideal future, hotel rooms will have color changing bulbs such that occupants can choose the color temperature they prefer.
@@jpe1 if people are going to a hotel for “romance” then they’re not really looking for romance. Just to say I don’t think they’d care about the color temperature of the lighting fixtures.
LIGHT’s LIKE MUSIC. When given the option to buy Super CD or DVD Audio with amazing sound… nearly everyone chose MP3-128k files that sounded like crap (and SACD, DVD-A died). People just don’t care about quality in music or lighting
.
I think this is the best comment I've seen on TH-cam. I will now have to start doing this to avoid any sterile daylight lamps in my future.
Oh man, I didn't know these existed but it's basically exactly what I want out of LED bulbs, shame I'm only hearing about them as they're seemingly on their way out lol
Look out for 'edison style' led bulbs, these have pretend filaments in them and a lovely warm light. Not dimmable though, but I love the light they give.
Sylvania makes some too
My only problem is he made it sound like they did not get white enough on the bright end.
I think the brightness color temp relation is baked into our vision system (due to sources such as the sun and fire), so this effect not only mimics incandescent bulbs, but also the types of light that we have evolved with.
Makes sense. The sunset and sunrise is much more orange/yellow and the afternoon is a bright white.
@@ohioplayer-bl9em It also affects your circadian rhythm, which is why some companies like Apple decided to introduce a warm dim setting on ipads and iphones.
i’ve replaced every bulb in my house with philips hue years ago, it cost a fortune to do but i’ve no regrets. i usually have them set to warm white or dim coloured at night, the ONLY time to use bright white is for cleaning and for that reason alone it’s worth having the option as it makes it so much easier to see what’s clean or not, but yeah… way too harsh for anything else
I'm thinking of putting the White Ambience Hue in my kitchen, but most of my rooms are at 4000K Philips Neutral White so I'm not sure how I might end up controlling the colour temp (aside from the cooker hood having a 3000K light)
@@samuell.foxton4177 you can set the colour or temperature they automatically use when turned on if that’s your concern, and change them at will in the app then
So did I. Took forever to get enough downlights because they so rarely were in stock. I use the very hot color temperatures in my office, which doesn't have a window for natural light. The bluer light helps my day/night cycle.
The biggest advantage of the smart bulbs, though, is that there's no constraints on what bulbs go to which switches in any combination or grouping. I've got a light over the kitchen sink that isn't on its own circuit, but now, I have a switch set just for that one bulb so I can turn it on and off by itself. And if I turn all the kitchen lights on, that one is still included in all the kitchen lights. I've also got a button that turns off every light in my house so I don't have to check if I've turned all my lights out in all the rooms. Just hit one button on the way out the door.
I actually use the bright white sort of like a SAD lamp in winter. I feel much more awake since I started working from home because of it
The other reason to use daylight colour is that people show up better on camera. Complexions look much more natural. Make everybody else on the zoom call look like a weird sallow goblin.
When I worked in the retail lighting industry, we had a product that mixed both cool (6k) and warm (3k) diodes in order to get a higher cri than either individual diode was capable of.
This is what I did before with Phillips Alto II 48-inch T8 fluorescents in the late-2010s.
I love these, too! The house I'm renting had a mixture of different color temperatures, brightnesses, incandescent, florescent, low-quality LEDs, and burnt out bulbs. One fixture even had three different kinds mixed together.
I bought new bulbs and now my living-room, dining-room, and bed-rooms are filled with a cozy, warm, dimmable light. My kitchen, mud-room, and bath-room are a nice bright day-light. I bought extra-bright bulbs for the kitchen, so now the whole room feels lit up. It's made such a positive difference in my mood. I can actually cook now. Even my friend noticed the positive change.
I unload and stock for Lowes, so I can confirm that Lowes stocks primarily GE bulbs. I can't remember for sure, but I seem to recall seeing a similar feature to Phillips's Warm Glow effect from GE in the store (though I would have to look again to confirm). I do know based upon what we stock that so called “tuneable white” bulbs have become *incredibly* popular, to the point where we sell contractor-special-style LED fixtures with tuneable colour temperature. I'll try to remember to update this comment once I've checked in at work.
Edit: See my reply below for the update
Ooo! What did you find?
@@KittyTwitty9876 Bad news, I'm afraid.
So, checking our lighting section, it's been rearranged since last I thoroughly pursued it, and the variety of bulbs has somewhat decreased. I can once again confirm that my Lowes stocks GE bulbs to the near exclusion of all else (the only other brands being Feit Electric and Cree Lighting, and only for smart bulb products). GE names their colour temperature lines, calling them, in order of increasing colour temperature: Relax, for their soft white 2700K options; Reveal, which offers a temperature of 2850K and a bunch of BS about colour purity; and Refresh, for their daylight-tuned offerings. They also have something called Vintage, which I thought *might* have the feature described in this video, but upon closer examination they had as few as 1 “filament”, so it is highly unlikely. Unfortunately, I couldn't say for sure because our display for them has been broken since I was hired. Vintage is interesting because it has two versions, one with clear glass that outputs around 2700K, and another with amber-tinted glass that outputs at 2000K. For the sake of completeness, I also checked all the bulbs that offered any kind of “adjustable white”. Unfortunately, the offerings from GE (via their Cync[sic] product line), Cree, and Feit all go from 2700K to 6000K; that and the fact that they all used Wi-Fi rather than Zigbee or Z-Wave meant that they are therefore not suitable for Alec's use case.
Also, on the point of the “adjustable white” contractor specials, those fixtures are intriguing as well because their adjustment is done at time of install, they don't have any smarts to them. That said, they are also 4 times the price of the normal, daylight-tuned contractor special LED fixtures, so they're probably more for owners looking to replace an existing fixture, rather than being for new installations.
Whether the GE equivalent was something that existed or not, I can find no evidence of it on GE's website or in the inventory system. If it were still being produced or existed to begin with, but we didn't have stock of it, it would still have an entry in the system. I suspect I misremembered an “adjustable white” bulb as something it wasn't.
"Dim-to-warm" was such an important feature when we were recessed light shopping. It's great. In one room, though, we have a ceiling fan light that dims, butndoesnt warm...and it looks so sickly when it's dimmed in comparison.
Finally someone who shares my passion for lighting! I wasted alone of money on bulbs trying to find the right color warmth. Thankyou for being a voice for people like me!
I'm glad to know there are plenty of people who care about the quality of their light
This is the first time I'd ever heard of this LED technology, much less have it explained so clearly and I've been leading the charge of upgrading light bulbs in our house for years going all the way back to the CFL days. And now that you've pointed out how LEDs work vs incandescents, I can't unsee it. Especially since I have two remaining incandescents in my house since they are so beautiful. They are 25W A19 GE bulbs in my kitchen pendant lights and they have been there for 16 years since I have yet to find a technology that really looks like them. Now you say one has been right under my nose and they are about to go away! Time to see if my Orange Store has any left but I'm not getting my hopes up. And since the pendants are now on a Lutron dimmer, I can limit the light output to mimic a 25W bulb or any brightness I choose since a 60W equiv bulb would be too eye searing for the application. And then there are other fixtures in the house that are either on dimmers now or will be soon. Durnit, now instead of looking to replace 2 bulbs, I may have to do a dozen.
Added note: I just checked my inventory of old bulbs and I have two 40W clear type incandescents in inventory which means I probably bought them to replace the 25W bulbs since the 25W type was no longer available. So I do have an option when these bulbs finally give up the ghost. But I may still have a hard look at my other bulbs on dimmers (like the dining room) since I’ve never been completely satisfied with the lighting in that chandelier. And my kitchen cans are an LED replacement for incandescents and I didn’t buy them all at once and they all don’t match. It doesn’t look like these types of fixtures are even available by Philips anymore.
Same never heard of these. But I'm also cheap. I'm not going to spend 4-10x as much for this feature
If you're looking for 25W incandescents you can still buy them as appliance bulbs. just make sure you get one with the correct base and voltage rating.
I echo pretty much everything you said. When LED bulbs first came out, I pleaded with any LED and bulb manufacturer I came across (I specifically remember talking to reps from CREE and Sylvania) to blend colors and achieve a good facsimile of incandescent lighting. Then Philips did it. I love these bulbs, and so I guess I better go stock up if I can still find them!
In the old days, high CRI was achieved by adding a few red LEDs to the whites. I still prefer the output of these older setups
LIGHT’s LIKE MUSIC. When given the option to buy Super CD or DVD Audio with amazing sound… nearly everyone chose MP3-128k files that sounded like crap (and SACD, DVD-A died). People just don’t care about quality in music or lighting
.
I have 8 Philips 454934 warmglow flood bulbs in my living room since 2015. My wife hates most leds due to the color temp, so I secretly swapped out the incandescent bulbs while she was out. These were the only bulbs she didn't immediately call out as being "unnatural". I never realized they were special "warm glow" bulbs until today. They do use 9.5 watts vs the current 457036 bulb that uses 7.2 watts, but the older version is 100 lumens brighter. Thanks for my tech trivia for the day!
I've been watching your videos for a while, about a year now. And I just have one single thing to say about your videos: they are Great. Your hard work is so valuable, because your reviews include so many levels of analysis like technology, design (and even philosophy sometimes). Congratulations and thanks very much for sharing all your knowledge with the world.
I do have Phillips Hue smart bulbs in my home and have generally been very happy with them, but I completely agree it drives me CRAZY when I go to a place that has mixed color temperature lighting, and I'm always shocked to see it in legit places like stores and businesses.
I do this in my office - one "warm" and one "cool" CFL in the single light fixture. I figured it would illuminate the room with a broader spectrum of light. Is it weird? I thought it was a good idea.
@@mr22guy Naw its weird. To me its always seemed tacky to have mismatched bulbs.
I see people complaining about this, but this seems to make no difference to me regarding comfort. The only annoying part is when I need to check the whiteness or colors of something. But that is solved by going under a cooler color light, and would kinda not be possible if all lights had the same warm bulbs for example.
@@mr22guy Since higher CRI LEDs tend to have more phosphor types in the goo, I also tried this in fixtures with multiple bulbs and indirect or frosted/shaded emitting surfaces. I don’t have any way to measure CRI, so I don’t know how successful I was.
@@mr22guy I do the same for my video recording setup. One cool, one warm. I general much prefer warm (2700K) bulbs, but the color balance on recording is better with multi-spectral lighting.
Something I just realized: Those filament style bulbs are able to hide the entire logic board inside the screw, but the frosted style ones don't. It might have been cheaper at one point to keep building the bigger logic boards, but at some point you'd think economies of scale would kick in and it'd make more sense to only have one type being manufactured in greater numbers. And surely there are some applications where it's aesthetically desirable to have a frosted bulb that emits light all the way around instead of just out the top.
The frosted bulbs mount the LEDs facing up on a PCB that acts as a heatsink. The walls are usually aluminium too making it less likely to fail from overheating
The filament glass bulbs can be either frosted or clear. The electronics of both are hidden in the base, where they are far away from heat produced by LEDs, and are more efficient because they can fit more individual diodes in series. But filament radiation pattern has a dark spot opposite from the base. They don't fit applications where you need a flood light. What they do with some is coat the glass with a mirror old-school style. But exposing the LEDs directly is more efficient.
Well, the tiny logic board has a giant issue IMO, namely the fact there's no smoothing capacitor in every filament I've ever tried which causes them to flicker like crazy.
The filament style should also be able to get away with less circuitry, since there are more smaller LEDs in a higher voltage series circuit, similar to how a string of Christmas lights is able to run directly off the mains with few or no extra components. At 7:20 it looks like there are 22 diodes in one filament, which comes to about 60v, meaning it can run directly off rectified 120v mains voltage.
Agree, I dislike the lower half of the envelope housing the drivers being dark, unacceptable in many fittings.
I couldn't aggree more! I only want warm light too, and as a CRI obsessive photographer, I've resorted to 'special effect' incandescent bulbs. My bedroom's main light is a dimmable 25w 2100K bulb, it turns into a full on cadle when dimmed and I LOVE IT IT'S A BEDROOM NOT A KITCHEN SHOWROOM.
While being probably the most professional and thorough videos on this entire platform, I'm consistently amazed at how watchable this is and how much soul they/you have. Big claps.
I love these types of videos it takes that childhood curiosity and goes just perfectly in depth enough to satisfy the curiosity and feel like I legitimately learn something. The randomness going from dishwashers to gfci to lightbulbs tickles me. Believe it or not a teacher of mine played one of your videos in class I thought that was cool. I think you should appreciate the change big or small you make with these “dumb” little videos. You got a style man, you got a style
Just programmed Home Assistant to make my full-color Philips Wiz bulbs change from the lowest color temperature to the highest along with the brightness. I like the effect, thanks.
And if companies would get off their asses, we could have that effect in any room of any house without any iot shenanigans. I'm blitzing mad about this.
Phillips Hue uses Zigbee. I'm pretty sure my lights responded to the remote even when I was restarting my router for internet issues. I know for sure my lights aren't connected to the internet. As far as I've read, it's even possible to get Phillips Hue bulbs without the bridge and set up a Zigbee hub on a Raspberry Pi or something
Edit: As much as I like the sun-like schedule I've put my lights on, my favorite feature by far is that I don't need internet for them to work
Yeah Hue uses bluetooth, so obviously no need for the internet, cause they use the bluethooth protocol
@@TEAserOne Newer bulbs use Bluetooth and Zigbee, but the Bridge only uses Zigbee.
If there's one thing I love about this channel, is the descriptive titles for the content of the video. Thank you for not going all click-baity with your titles and thumbnails, keep up the great and informative work!
I mean yeah, apart from the fact he didn't realize that Phillips doesn't product, nor sells Phillips Hue bulbs, the Phillips Lighting department was split off the main Phillips company in 2015 and is it's own thing now called Signify, they produce and sell these bulbs, not Phillips. But part of the splitting off process was Phillips allowing Signify to keep using the Phillips brand, cause else their independence would quickly end in bankruptcy, cause the Phillips brand does mean something.
Also nice: the Phillips Warm Glow bulbs still work with rheostats - the old school style of dimmer switch.
Smartphone-centric smart bulbs only have a very niche actual use. Like if you own a building with a 1950s marquee and want to change the color for holidays without rewiring, or like at my last job we had philips hue bulbs set up so they'd go red any time a contractor was in the office who wasn't disclosed on what product we were making, thus helping people keep the secret. But other than those instances, I loath the over-pushing over philips hue bulbs onto consumers. I think it is a waste of technology and a waste of data bandwidth.
If they sold an entirely internet-free and smartphone-free bulb remote or programmer, I'd feel better about it, but they really dont to my liking.
Light bulbs don't need a mac address!
I disagree. Those smart bulbs are rather nice if you know how to use them (not only with a smartphone, but mainly with smart switches / panels). However I agree if you just need light they are overcomplicated.
One thing however that is great at least right now is that they are still engineered to last. I have never had a smart bulb failing, they seem to underrun the LEDs.
Philips Wiz (exclusive to Home Depot) has a Wiz Remote option to use instead of a smartphone.
I believe they still need to connect to internet to setup.
Phillips bulbs used to be just a specific flavor of Z-wave with their own encryption. I wish they'd have kept it that way.
Hue is Bluetooth or Zigbee+local bridge control, with cloud access being opt-in. Sure, you still need a smartphone at least to pair the lights to the bridge, but they're _not_ internet-connected.
@@NozomiShinobuCrest That would be Hue. It's actually Zigbee, not Z-Wave, which is also an open protocol, and it doesn't have any special encryption, it just is Zigbee. Plenty of ways out there to control those (in fact, the switches that TC showed in this video are a popular option, because they're one of very few models out there that let you separate the buttons on the front panel from the internal dimmer/relay, allowing you to use the buttons as a control input, while leaving the power to the smart bulb live when you hit the "off" button).
Wiz, on the other hand, is frustratingly Bluetooth, which doesn't play nice with much of anything.
Used to have some of these in my living room. They are great. I was actually looking for them earlier this year and couldn't find them and this answers why. I'm actually using a mixture of conventional dimmable LEDs like these on smart switches and smart bulbs in rooms that I do want to have finer control over colour temperature. (I use cool light in my office during the day to help focus and switch to warm light when at the end of the day on a fixed schedule)
I kinda agree with you that it's much better if the logic lived in the switches as opposed on the lights and kinda wish the industry standardised on a protocol to allow smart switches to configure smart lights without requiring expensive hardware on the bulbs themselves. It should be possible though getting these industries to agree on standards especially when vendor lock-in is so lucrative is a different matter entirely.
I've actually got those Sylvania ones in my basement. At first I bought them right after I bought my house because the basement had like 15 120 watt bulbs in there. Then I remembered they were dimmable and decided to install a dimmer switch and they are really pretty nice. My basement came with the 70's wood paneling and some crazy neat carpet in it and keeping it dimmed just above full off makes it a very cozy space.
I'm one of those people that that mixes both daylight and warm LED lighting, but I do it very intentionally. I used to do theatrical lighting and a common technique is to have a warmer filter on the left lights a cooler one on the right. Faces on stage, especially with brighter lighting, tend to get their features washed/flattened out. One way to compensate for this is to use exaggerated makeup. But another way of helping to correct this is to have warm on one side and cool on the other. I always liked the effect and even the different colored shadows. It seems more interesting and dynamic to me (but maybe it's just nostalgia). So when lighting a room I tend to put warm on one side and cool on the other or warm for the direct lighting and cool for the indirect.
P.S. I love Technology Connections because here, at last, is someone as picky and quirky as I am.
"Faren-hot" fucking killed me 😂. I'm dead now and you're amazing!
Edit: "Hue did this!" got me too 😅
In the 6 houses I've lived in, I can only remember one room ever having a dimmer switch, and it NEVER got used.
Although, I do have smart bulbs in all my lamps, and I use the dimming function all the time, especially when I'm watching TV.
I, for the most part, have a preference for warmer bulbs, with two exceptions. In the kitchen and office I have daylight balanced bulbs, because I find it easier to concentrate with a cooler light.
Oh, and in the bathroom I have Cool White lights, not because I chose them, but because I ordered warm lights, got sent cool (not even daylight), and when I complained they just refunded me. So, rather than letting them go to waste I just put them up, and I must admit I do quite like the perceived brightness!
I prefer cool lights in the bathroom, you need to see stuff. I think the kitchen is also a good place for the same reason but I also have smart bulbs most places and they're warm and warm is nicer. I'm the same way too where I started dimming or brightening all the time to fit the situation when I got smart lights.
The only house I know with dimmer switches is my uncle's. I once housesit there for a month and only used the dimmers once before just using them as binary on/off switches.
Honestly even with the two "smart" bulbs I have I only extremely rarely care to lower their brightness befause there's very few situations where I would want that over having them off completely, usually whatever I initially set up is what I found comfortable for regular use.
Also I like warm lights but definitely as a "novelty". In a kitchen warm lights make things look gross, worse in the bathroom. In my bedroom I use one of those smart bulbs to switch from orange to white to pink, white if I want to focus, orange/pink-white for mood setting if doing anything else
I always grew up in homes with a dimmer switch on the dining room light and in some dens/TV rooms. But otherwise we tended to not have dimmers. Most lights were still either on or off, or some lamps were 3-stage (usually with 50-100-150 W bulbs in them).
As for color temperature, I tend to prefer warm-white for indoor lighting. Though I don't mind different fixtures being different too much, especially at opposite ends of a room.*
* Heck, my brother's kitchen has a big backlit clock with very white bulbs in it, that do _not_ match the warmer-colored bulbs over the dining table. But it's fine to me, since it's at the other end of the room, and the whiter bulbs go well with the very white clock face.
Yessss!!!!! Yes! yES! You are so 100% correct on this. I have been a fan of these Philips warm glow lights since about 9 years ago. And I noticed I can't find them anywhere. They want you to upgrade to their BS stupid smart lights because they have more profit.
It's fascinating that incandescent bulbs are still legal in the US.
I had my whole studio in London equipped with these Phillips ones and I loved them!
It would be so cool to have them now living in LA.
Not the incandescent bulbs! Meanwhile, Germany thinks it's time to turn back on the coal plants.
@@ivy_47 Really?? I thought Germany is fine with nuclear energy...
@@lukastemberger They decommissioned most nuclear plants and have just now started bringing coal back online due to shortage of natural gas. France are the cool ones keeping up their nuclear power.
@@lukastemberger
They walked back on nuclear somewhat, after Fukushima's nuclear accident.
@@ivy_47 Omg, that's so stupid :-/ Germany is supposed to be the biggest role model for Europe.
It always kinda bites when something you like gets discontinued, but my favorite bulb's manufacturer straight up went out of business. Now I gotta start trying new bulbs again. It was nothing special. Just a 3000K bulb but it most closely replicated the color and light output of my favorite incandescent bulbs. Most others were either slightly too warm or too cool and slightly too dim (none were ever too bright). Also, we bought a pile of their shop lights to light our basement/garage. If any go bad, well..... I just gotta pick something else.
Hyperikon?? I know they just went TU recently
Absolutely fantastic video, as usual. I learned something, was never bored, and I appreciate the time and effort that had to go into making this kind of content. Well done.
Home Depot has a bunch of new Philips warm glow SKUs in stock on their website. They have "ultra definition" in the name and a CRI of 95. The previous warm glow iteration seems to have a CRI of 90.
Seems also that WarmGlow is now a subset of EyeComfort
Daylight balanced bulbs is great for the bedroom, actually. I have some bright smart bulbs that fade in the last half an hour before I have to get out of bed. Waking to a bright, daylight balanced room really does help signal to my brain that it's time to get up. Especially in winter, when there's no daylight outside. In the evening I've set them to grow warmer, though.
Yeah, there's a lot of lighting situations like that where they're nice.
Personally, I have mixed warm/cool bulbs in my overhead bedroom light, and use some strip-lighting to provide different temps for late evening. A nice fire-orange, or pink, even just flat red is just fine to see your way into bed by. Or, out to the bathroom once you're all cozy, too.
This is actually the perfect use case for either something like the warm glow effect, or smart lighting. The cool white is great for waking you up.... whether it's morning or night. At night, warm white causes the brain to relax more, ahead of sleep, and cool white should absolutely be avoided (that's precisely what the whole "blue light" trend is about). These solutions let you have the best of both worlds.
Philips sold its lighting division a few good years ago. At the moment, "Philips Hue" and "Philips" bulbs are actually produced by different companies that own the names
Humans aren't really viable as a species
that's funky lmao. like how ups and ups store are completely different companies
Darn, I hate that, If In buy Philips, I expect Philips- scratch them from my list.
Incorrect... Philips spun off its lighting division (which includes the Hue brand) as a separate company, which later became Signify. Quoth the Wiki:
"In September 2014, Philips announced that the company intended to demerge the company into two market-leading entities, one focused on health and medical technology and the other on connected LED lighting solutions.[2]
On 3 May 2016, Philips announced the formation of the separated company called Philips Lighting N.V.. Philips stated that the main reason for the demerger was that the medical technology business accounted for more than 40% of sales, while its lighting solutions arm remained a major money-spinner, selling products in 180 countries.[3] The separated entity had an initial public offering on 27 May 2016, valued at $3.4 billion; 25% of the shares were offered. The company listed on Euronext Amsterdam under ticker code "LIGHT".[4]
In March 2018, Philips Lighting announced that the company would change its name to Signify, which became effective on 16 May 2018. However, Signify continued to produce some of its lighting products under the Philips brand.[5][6]
On 16 April 2019, Signify acquired the Hong Kong-based Wi-Fi connected lighting solutions provider, WiZ Connected, for an undisclosed amount.[7]
On 2 March 2020, Eaton sold its lighting business, Cooper Lighting Solutions, to Signify for USD 1.4 billion.[8]
On 20 December 2021, Signify announced it has entered a final agreement with ams Osram to acquire Fluence for USD 272 million, subject to regulatory approvals.[9]"
They spun off the lighting division in 2016, they didn’t sell it. It changed its name to Signify NV from Philips Lighting NV.
I totally get it, while I did have to go the smart bulb route way in the beginning (when they were still $50 a pop, ugh) due to renting with basically no switched outlets and not great natural daylight coverage, I would take warm all the time if I had no other choice. Warm bulbs during the day is ok, but daylight color at night is intolerable, I have some friends with that and I can't figure out how they live with it. Got that homey "hospital waiting room" feel
Which is precisely why I love the daylight colour ones. They feel brighter, they keep me more awake(ish) and they are generally more useful for tasks where seeing colours is important
@@angryakita3870 I mean, me too, but not quite the vibe I want at 9pm
my colour temperatures differ per room although my house is quite open so the kitchen is conected to the living room. yet the kitchen has 4000k bright white while the living room has a cosy 2200k (and the dining area 2700)
so its mostly depend on the funktion of the room rather than how it looks bedrooms and the living room are soft warm while technical rooms are bright white. halways are a bit warmer white than technical rooms but still quite bright.
and then there is the bathroom which has two sets of light one super warm and soft and the other bright white because you know baths and shaving/makeup need difrent light
though i find the mix of colours somtimes add up nicely to the 80s cyberpunk look of most of my electra
Good stuff Alec. I've never bought a single smart bulb, I always thought the smarts should be in the switches and outlets. About half the switches in my house are dimmable and the only place I'd put a 5000K bulb is in the garage. One beef I've had with CFLs and now LEDs is that they often fail long before they should. Another trend in LED lighting is fixtures with LEDs built in, if the LED fails you must replace the whole fixture, that should be illegal.
The fixtures do have better heatsinking though, and so tend to last a lot longer. Definitely an annoying design when they do eventually start to die, though.
Oh no! After trying every LED bulb at Lowes and Home Depot, I used Philips Warm Glow to replace every bulb in my house. They were the only ones that looked decent.
It would be such a loss if these go away. Also, they work great with Lutron Caseta smart dimmers.
Agree with all of this. Have loved the warm glow bulbs for years. Super sad to hear this :( Most of the time I do not need or want individual smart blubs.
Good news, they're still around in their Ultra Definition line of bulbs. The feature is just shown less on the box
Damn! I moved into a new house and had issues with LED's flickering on a dimmer switch circuit. I thought it was a fixture issue. The switch itself makes so much more sense. Thank you!
Yeah, that's just how LEDs were originally. The bulbs I bought 6 years ago still work, but I replaced them with these and it's incredible. I actually use my dimmer now! Lol
While I appreciate your desire to get dimming which works just like incandescent (something I didn't even realize even existed in LED form other than the adjustable color temp smart bulbs you mentioned), I'm actually the opposite. I *like* the fact that LEDs can maintain a fairly consistent color temperature at multiple brightness levels. I *hated* how incandescents would get entirely too warm in color as they were dimmed. I have a favorite color temp (3000K because 2700 is too yellowy and 4000 is too white), and I like having that temperature regardless of how bright the bulb is. But that's also what's great about LEDs... these sorts of things are actually possible.
It also makes it easier on the other complaint he had on the lights not being the same... Well, if you use all LED, it's a lot easier to do just that for the simpletons of the world who just want lights that work.
The warmer light is better for the eyes, if you go to sleep with very dim warm light your eyes don't hurt when waking up.
First time I'm hearing about this and sad to hear that they're taking these away before I could even get them... I know EXACTLY what you're saying about the dimmers WOW! I wished I knew about this option. Grrrrr....
I agree with you. I didn't know these were a thing until now.
A decade ago I was at CES and spoke with a vendor who was showing color-controllable LED bulbs. I asked him if they made a bulb that would change color as it was dimmed, and he asked why would I want that. "Because incandescents do that." This is the first I'm hearing of an actual implementation.
Also a decade ago, I had a major kitchen renovation and installed dimmers on everything. I saw incandescent bulbs being outlawed, so I stocked up. The dimmers limit the power to a max of about 85%, so after a dozen years I have only replaced one of 12 bulbs.
OMG THANK YOU!! I thought I was going crazy when I swapped out my switch for a dimmer. I noticed same day that my kitchen seemed dimmer and dug into a rabbit hole to find out why, and saw the DOE publication with that exact 85% number. I'm fairly certain they do this artififically to cover the 15% of energy that is dissipated in the triac. Hypothetically, would you be interested in a dimmer that got to the full 100% instead of 85%? The other downside with 85% is some lamps have an audible buzz since they never revive the full unchopped waveform. Downside of 100% is not under driving your lamps to save life. Though the down side of under driving is lower efficacy. I'm quite conflicted in this, but may be working on a 100% dimmer and floating around whether it's worth fully building out.
These are really sweet, I loved these bulbs. Other than the warm glow, they also have a really wide dimming range (as you mentioned, you can make them barely glow) and have no flicker.
Another thing, I find newer Sylvania LED bulbs to be utter garbage.
I do a lot of lighting related things in my job, and I've had the color temperature discussion with many customers. People are clueless about color temperature, generally. And even some people who understand don't care at all. I know that seems crazy to those of us who watch this video, but it's true. That's why better light bulbs seem to be a pipe dream
yeah, to be honest I am the kind who doesn't care but this video got me thinking that the shiny white bulb in my bedroom may be why I don't like having it on
Philips do can lights that perfectly warm when dimmed at night and are bright and cool at 100% but you can also choose to just keep it warm or cool. They’re the smart bulbs though. Having a smart switch rather than bulbs makes more sense in most ways, but I also just really wanted warming bulbs so that’s what I went with.
We’ll see when matter finally launches
Whew, great looking switch at the 13:36 mark (on the right that is haha)!
Kidding aside, great video and I completely agree with the part around Z-Wave/Zigbee (mostly Z-Wave) needing to do a better job communicating what it is the protocol can do and that hubs aren't necessarily bad at all.
Keep up the great work and thanks for the support!
Eric
Founder | Inovelli
I live in CA, where it has been hard to get these bulbs thanks to regulations regarding the CRI of LED bulbs, but recently, Walmart has started stocking these bulbs, so you may want to check them for these bulbs now. Also in California, Home Depot has stopped selling almost all Philips lighting products, opting to instead sell a mix of Feit Electric and Sylvania products, so I wonder if that change is starting to make its way nationwide.
Also, by the end of this year, it will no longer be possible to buy most incandescent and halogen bulbs (that were not already banned), meaning either you have to stock up (if you like using those bulbs), or find replacements (like the Philips LEDs discussed in this video).
How did I not know these exist? This is exactly what I've always wanted! Maybe a shift on all dimmable levels to the warmer side by just a bit, then I'd be in heaven.
I also didn't know these existed. I could have sworn I saw Philips light bulbs with very similar branding, but I didn't know they performed in this way!
I have these bulbs and love them because they looked the most like an incandescent, a couple years ago. However, i don't dim my lights and never realized that dimming was what made these so special. I suspect that, due to product shortages, and there being a lot of people like me, this may mean an accelerated end date to a great product.
Hey everyone, very interesting technology indeed! Another cool idea is dimming without the need for a dimming switch. I have some LED-Bulbs which start at full brightness when turned on. Then you can double-click the switch (off-on) and the brightness is slowly lowered until minimum. Another double-click starts the slow increase of brightness. While dimming up oder dimming down, you can use a double-click to stop at the desired brightness. The ultimate lightbulb I have uses this function combined with dim-to-warm! So you can dim, the colour temperature behaves similar to an incandescend bulb and you don't need a dimming switch! That's neat!
Protip: If you have to ask yourself "Is [company] discontinuing [really good product that isn't literally their flagship]?" the answer is always yes.
edit: oops, dropped my ]
Two local Fry's stores still had these in stock just about a week ago, I definitely remember seeing the filament-style one recently.
I never really looked into what the feature was, I assumed it was just to mimic the aesthetic of an incandescent bulb, didn't realize it also behaved differently from a regular LED bulb.
I didn't know I needed these. I have a bunch of recessed downlights (new construction) that have that uncomfortable effect when dimmed. I did find some replacements that are branded as "EyeComfort" that claim to go "from 2700K down to a soft glow". Maybe they're going to repackage these warm glow lights with different branding? Either way, thanks for highlighting these!
"Cozy," is the best description that I can use to describe incandescent light also. Incandescent light best represents the glow of light from a fire or flame, it's primal.
I think it was one of the Survivor TV shows when they were in the Australian Outback when one of the survivors (Cody?) likened a campfire as the Outback television.
Over a decade ago when I lived in San Diego, CA, there was a Denny's restaurant in Pacific Beach that changed all of its lights to that bright blueish daylight temperature of ~5000K. It was probably fine during the daylight hours, but when I drove by that place at night it stood out like a sore thumb and gave me a nauseous feeling. Almost like walking into a sterile facility, or into a human sized bug zapper with its blueish-greenish-violet death light.
Working in video production in the 90's taught me something about color temperatures and the importance of white balancing a camera and making someone's flesh tones look correct. Sometimes it was a battle when there were mixes of daylight (blue hue), fluorescent (green hue), and incandescent (orange hue) lighting in a shot.
Enjoy every photon.
I feel this. The last time I was buying light bulbs, I felt overwhelmed. A lightbulb used to be a light bulb for the most part. Most people only needed to decide between wattage and sometimes single or three way bulbs. Occasionally you needed something special for a fixture, or maybe you wanted a party light. As far as incandescent lighting was concerned, choices were fairly simple and straightforward. Not anymore. It just seems needlessly complicated now, especially smart lighting. Does everything need to connect to the Internet and a smart phone? It used to be that you bought a bulb and screwed it in -- done! A lot of appliances used to be simpler to use, very intuitive. As interesting as innovation can be, I miss how easy it was to navigate things in the past. Modern tech has added layers of complexity that really don't need to be there, and it's become so ubiquitous that it's becoming harder to opt out.
I'm with you, by the way, on hating mixed temperature lamps together. *shudders* I can't stand that! I'm all for warm lighting. I've always hated fluorescent lighting because of its cold, blue glow, especially from cheap fixtures that also had flickering, buzzing bulbs. Even now, nothing truly yet beats an old-fashioned light bulb. I just want it that simple, and I see no reason why that shouldn't be an option. Sigh...
My local store recently introduced 95CRI (they call it “Ultra Definition”) version of the warm glow dimmable bulbs from Philips.
Could it be that they were getting rid of the “Shows natural colours 90CRI” bulbs?
@Les You mean incandescents? Yes, the color is nice, but they're incredibly inefficient. When I converted my mom's house to CFLs almost 30 years ago, her electricity bill fell by about 25%.
@@almostfm pretty sure they are LED with cri of 95. Saw some the other day at the orange store
I got a notification for a reply that said this: "I think your missing the point - the "Ultra Definition" doesn't get 'warmer' as you dim it" except I can't find it.
The "Warm white" version does advertise as "warm glow" as well.
I love everything about color temperature, especially shifting color temps as the day goes on. It always sucks when something you love gets discontinued for lack of appreciation.
I agree completely , I hate those bright white bulbs , I love the warm glow stuff....
It's funny, I actually stripped all the dimmer switches out of my rental flat soon after I moved in because they annoyed the hell out of me. I prefer a nice clicky switch.
I tried one of those warm glow bulbs, and I found it to be really intolerant of power line fluctuations. Turning on my amplifier or a vacuum cleaner would cause a huge dip in brightness.
@@ingulari3977 The warm glow bulbs didn't dim in response to fluctuations like an incandescent bulb does, and it was worse than the GE LED bulbs I usually use. The dip in brightness was quite sharp.
that happens to any power connected source. it just gets hidden if there is an inductor or capacitor in the circuit because they store and discharge energy to cover the gap
@@Blox117 Exactly, my other LED bulbs can compensate for the dip at least a little. The warm glow one didn't.
@@ingulari3977 Nope, incandescents have hysteresis, they take a moment to adapt to voltage changes. Frequently ignoring some voltage dips.
Better/newer style dimmers that are LED specific help a lot with this.
OMG! That hoarding at the end totally caught me off guard, but really should not have. 😜
I dunno, once the light bulb illuminati discover this video, those bulbs may get far scarcer yet.
Through the magic of buying ALL OF THEM
Similar with me and incandescent bulbs, though I have more of them,
I found some of these bulbs at a target near me (WI), so they are still being made and likely in stock near you, they’re even the clear bulb style with the very-much-better ballast design that uses the socket and wiring as a heat sink and stuff.
My dad was looking for orange and purple bulbs for Halloween and what not and I saw the warm glow packaging and almost audibly gasped and thought, “hey, technology connections said these are great but also hey they’re still in stock” so I bought 3 boxes, and I must concur, they are great