so when i sat down to review the script for this video with Jake we debated the
title for a while and finally i asked him point blank
are phillips hue bulbs a ripoff and he
goes well i'd say they're making a pretty
good profit and isn't that pretty much the problem
with all of this smart home stuff by the time you got your brand name caseta
switches nest thermostat august lock hue bulbs you're five ten grand deep in this
stuff and every time i pull out a calculator and add it up i basically end
up with yeah screw it i'm gonna find another way
and find another way we did
no not that way in today's video we're gonna be looking at smart bulbs from a
relatively unknown company called yeelight that promised to be an
affordable alternative to philips hue and lifx
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canada they're opening a new store in victoria bc and they're hiring for all
positions learn more at the link below first let's take a look at the
incumbents starting with the ultra popular phillips hue phillips was one of
the first players in the consumer smart lighting space back in 2012 when they
launched their system as an apple store exclusive the entire product stack
including their 800 lumen bulb makes use of the zigbee wireless standard a slow
but ultra low power mesh based network that connects compatible devices
together now it does require a hub to facilitate a connection to the outside
internet ow but the use of this tech allowed philips
to make
why why would you throw them
the use of this tech allowed philips to make devices like their tap wireless
button that can control your lights while only being powered by the kinetic
energy of pushing the buttons that is pretty damn cool
now a lot of people complain about the necessity of the hub
but even with the hubs pricing factored in the bulbs are still cheaper than our
next competitor and the added functionality seems like a worthwhile
compromise now let's take a look at the lifx ecosystem these guys are an
originally crowdfunded company one that actually shipped their product wow
and they also started out in 2012 with support for both iOS and Android unlike
hue at the time life x bulbs are wi-fi based meaning that no hub is required
but they do share some traits with the hue as they operate as a sort of mesh
with one master bulb connecting directly to your regular old Wi-Fi and the rest of
them connecting to each other via an 802.15.4
mesh network this technology makes lifx's bulbs the most efficient
and they also happen to be the brightest ones but that comes at a cost
even their minis will run you 45 bucks
each and their standard a19 bulbs weigh in at a whopping 60 dollars apiece
finally there's e-light a company we actually
don't know that much about and you might not have even heard of what we do know
is that they are affiliated in some way with xiaomi and that they have a metric
but ton of different products kind of like the philips hue ecosystem but we're
ignoring most of that because today's focus is on their smart bulbs and
specifically the RGB w1 it's similar to
the hue at 800 lumens but it costs just
shy of 18 right now on aliexpress with
no hub required that is less than half the cost of a hue bulb and less than a
third of the full-size lifx a saving that is huge all on its own and that
only increases as you purchase more and more bulbs
spec wise now it's a lot of the same with the only major differences being
the higher light output and the efficiency of the lightfx and the much
lower price of the e-light otherwise they all have the same rated life
expectancy the same warranty and the same mount type
let's talk setup then both the e-light and the live fx require an account to
control the lights at all by contrast hue works fine without an account but
only on your local network overall the setup process on all three
ecosystems is really easy with hue edging out a slight win here thanks to
its ability to add multiple lights at once and with the kit lights coming
pre-configured that's pretty nice as for the e lights we did experience
some weirdness where it would say setup failed almost every time but then after
backing out of that menu the light shows up and is fully functional it was kind
of like the setup wizard was timing out or something so if your lights still
don't show we'd recommend logging out and then back in that should fix the
issue with the light setup it's time to take a look at the apps
view features imo the most intuitive user experience
of the bunch almost all of the features are easy to access with both power and
brightness controls available on the main screen and setting up scenes and
schedules is a total breeze which also brings us to one of the app's biggest
shortcomings the lack of global scenes as well as the inaccessibility of them
scenes on the hue system are on a room by room basis meaning that if you wanted
to set both your kitchen and your living room to a specific scene you'd have to
click through two separate menus or issue two separate voice commands to
achieve that result lifx and yi light both have global scene
lighting speaking of which i guess let's move over to the lifx app
overall it's also very easy to use but i
feel like they kind of tried too hard to make the app unique and ended up
sacrificing some functionality in the process for example the color control
wheel has a super annoying design where you can only control it on one axis at a
time why are you trying to be special just
use a regular color wheel that you can just click on like everybody else i also
don't like the lack of brightness control on the main page
but i suspect this won't bother most people once they have their scenes set
up bringing us to the underdog elight their app
is a little less intuitive with some menus that are buried too deep and
several instances of unnecessary clicking but the overall functionality
is really solid with easy access to scenes and power and brightness controls
on the main pages it's also worth noting that the yeelight app has very powerful
scene control with customization of scenes available on a light by light
basis it can be pretty time consuming to set it up but it does give you a lot of
flexibility in return so considering the major flaw of the hue
app and the weird design choices of the lifx one we're going to give the win
here to yeelight for its powerful scene customization and no bs approach
last but not least we have to look at smart functionality
all three platforms have support for alexa google home yeti and if this than
that but apple users beware
as of shooting this video only lifx and hugh work with apple homekit now there
have been some rumblings of other xiaomi brands looking into homekit but at this
time the best you'll be able to find for your yeelight is some third-party home
bridge plug-in so if you're the hacky type yeah you could probably get it to
work but if you want something that just goes out of the box you'll need to pay
more for your lights or you could switch to Android
if you're an Android user any of these three are great choices
with if we had to pick a winner
i'd say for me the low cost of the ulights is
definitely going to be what finally gets me on the smart bulb train for my house
700 to do everything which i probably wouldn't do it's still a lot of money
but it's a lot less than two grand or
more with that said if you're looking for the
most efficient or the brightest lights lifx is the way to go and as for the hue
system well their saving grace is really
the accessories like motion sensors and
fancy buttons so if that kind of thing tickles your fancy then hue might be for
you can you believe we made it all this way in this video without making like a
joke something about these lights having like dragon energy or something
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the video description so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if
it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at
the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
community forum which you should totally join there we have it there's a dragon
energy reference dragon oh wow his ear fell off
that wasn't my fault you drop everything
let caseta get the lights
honey did we get the lights downstairs
alexa turn on good night
okay