Hue and Govee: Take smart lighting to the next level

Hue's newer lights no longer require the Hue hub, and this is one of those lights. With the hub, you get automation and smart home scheduling (although Alexa can do that, too, without the hub). We really like this product because it doesn't require a wall outlet. Instead, you charge it up, and you get about 10 hours (in our testing) of white or colored light.

This is great for an atmospheric corner, although the recharging might be a pain. Where I think this will get a lot of use is with photographers, YouTubers, and videographers who want to create a spot of light or a mood in their videos. Just plant it where you want the light, and the mood will follow.

We've seen a lot of smart wall accent lights over the years. What makes this one cool (beyond Govee's knock-it-out-of-the-park light animations) is that you can arrange these lights like straws on the wall. On kit will get you eight straight pieces and four corners, which you can arrange however you like.

You can get quite far with one kit, but the Govee app allows you to link together more than one kit, so you can create entire walls of light wild enough to rival your local club. Use them at home, in a meeting room, in a lobby, or as accents in a retail establishment. No matter how you arrange them, they are very cool.

Smart lighting has come a long way in the past few years. I bought the first Hue bulb, the classic A19, used 9 watts and put out the rough equivalent of a 60W incandescent bulb. These E26 bulbs use a tad more juice at 11W and put out the lighting equivalent of a 75W incandescent bulb.

But it's the price that's the big change. I spent $60 each on my first Hue bulbs back in 2014. This kit gets you four bulbs for $21.99 or less than $6 each. You can now get ten bulbs for what I paid for a single bulb. Of course, since 2014, I've populated my house with Hue bulbs. They're in almost every room and made a huge difference in the quality of life. My only wish: that there were 150W and 200W equivalent bulbs for a brighter presentation.

Hey, Philips, get to work on that, please!

This is another cool offering by Govee. These are small, free-standing light bars you can put next to your monitor, your stereo, or a smaller TV. They'll also work near larger TVs, but they just aren't as tall as some big TVs. They can run light field animations from Govee's app.

What sets these lights out is their internal microphone. They can listen to the sound in your room and pulse and dynamically change based on those sounds. There have long been apps that tie to Hue lights to do this, but Govee's solution doesn't require the app to be open or your phone to be listening (or even on).

I really like this light, which is why I include it. But I'm not sure you'll be able to get your hands on one. Basically, it's like a shorter version of the Govee Lyra I reviewed last year. The Lyra is tall enough that it lives on the floor. The Hue Signe looks almost identical but is sized for a table. Govee does have a table light, but it's not nearly as sleek as either the Hue Signe or the Lyra.

But here's the challenge. While the Signe is very nice, the review unit I got from Hue arrived beat to crap. This may be a common problem because the only units you can get on Amazon are from the Amazon Warehouse and third-party sellers. Hue's site itself shows them as out of stock. That said, I'm including the Signe in this list because it really is a great light -- if you can find it.

Govee sent me two different Immersion kits, and while they both get the job done, I definitely found the more expensive unit worked better for me. The standard Immersion kit consists of a stick-on LED strip and a camera you mount on top of your TV. The camera watches the TV and captures the color ambience. It sends that data to the light strip, providing an immersive backlight experience for your TV. It's definitely cool.

The more expensive version ($89 instead of $129) includes two free-standing Flow-style lights that allow you to direct more light away from your TV. In my case, I have a rather large TV (don't judge me, I need my science fiction!), and the larger kit does provide better immersion. Either way, the Immersion products up the TV watching experience to a surprising level.

Our living room has been sporting the brightest Hue bulbs we could find, which were great for mood but terrible if we wanted to read or do any work. My wife and I needed more light, and we reached the point where we actually considered putting a bunch of Hue bulbs together in a cluster.

We did a lot of research and finally found lights that seemed to work. We bought one, tested it, compared the light level from these to our Hues, and confirmed that a Hue bulb at 100% matched one of these lights at 20%. 

We bought four. Well, not exactly. The lamps we bought are branded Adecorty and are no longer available on Amazon. Instead, I'm linking to lamps branded by HueLiv (see what they did to that trademark?). These are exactly the same specs and use the same promotional pictures and writing as the ones we bought, so hopefully, they're just as good.