A few here know I've been playing with effects lighting for the soon-to-be-layout. The new Apple/Philips
Hue Lighting System popped-up on my radar. This is a system of programmable-color LED bulbs in a medium-base (standard screw-in) form factor, controlled wirelessly via an internet bridge "puck" that connects to your Wi-Fi router and talks to an iPhone/iPad app via that router. The bridge device can control up to 50 bulbs. It is currently an Apple Store-exclusive product.
So... I bit. A starter package arrived yesterday. Friggin' amazing. This will
vastly simplify my lighting plan.
1. First impression... it's pricey. $60/bulb. Ouch. With that out of the way...
2. Once I figured-out that the bridge had to plug into the Wi-Fi router (and not my managed LAN), it started right up and connected with the bulbs. The iPhone app found the bridge, and
voila!, I was controlling bulbs.
3. Emphasis is personal household uses, more along the lines of mood lighting. They are rated at 600 lumens - roughly a 60W incandescent equivalent. In testing I found this to be about right - reading was comfortable with the bulb set to a warm-ish white.
4. Color gamut is good but not great. It does not have a good green, and true blue comes-up a little short. Red and indigo to purple are nice and rich. The gamut is the green triangle in this CIE diagram:
That said, lighting applications for illumination uses and MRR effects really doesn't have much call for green. So this works. My objective of sunset/rise transitions and indigo nights will work perfectly.
5. The Philips iPhone software controls the bulbs and bulb groups fairly well manually. The software allows timed sequences, but control there is minimum, with fade in/out rates of 0, 3 or 9 minutes. I did find the fades to be a little abrupt in starting and stopping, turning on at ~25% and then fading into full value for the scene levels.
5a. There is one MacOS app available, and it's very buggy. I got it to work once, and it crashed during testing, and then would never connect with bulbs thereafter. It wasn't the Mac or the network, as I was still able to control the bulbs from my Mac using the API debug interface.
6. The API interface is where we are going to need to work. This stuff is too new to have seen much development work for apps other than basic consumer controls. The control scheme, by the way, is
not Mac-specific, but uses conventional JSON architecture, so it should only be a matter of time before other developers put together Win or even micro-PC interfaces (Raspberry comes to mind!).
7. A minor issue is the system assumes that power to the bulb is on all the time. Turning power off and then on resets the bulb state to a default of a warm white around 3500K, at 90% intensity. So the bulbs lack "persistence" - you cannot set the levels, turn off the circuit and then turn everything on expecting things to be where you left them. I think this is by design as there are possible ambiguities in choosing a power-on default scheme.
8. Though I'm not in any way a serious photog, I think the Hue system has great potential for the model photographer. The raw color control inputs (versus the "scene" presets) feature a color temperature input separate from the color gamut display.
9. I already inquired of Philips whether there would be other bulb types, such as PAR formats. They replied there are plans to release other form factors, and will announce a schedule on meethue.com.
Frankly, most will find the cost off-putting. However, relative to what I was building with stage lighting components and controllers in my large space, the components costs are a wash, with wiring complexity reduced by 80%. Since my general layout lighting was based on Halo-compatible track lighting anyway (read: "cheap Lowes parts"), when Philips releases PAR-format bulbs I can add those to the plan and improve the setup without having to do anything more than change or add track heads. Sign me up!
[I'll try to get photos of tests in the next couple of days. I'll have to move some of my network stuff to the studio to make it happen, so it's not a small task.]
