Philips Hue: The smart lighting gives you an electrifying experience like never before

We bet that once you use Philips Hue, you will not be able to switch back to normal lighting systems. It's polished. It's easy to use. It works with just about everything. The only problem? The price. A starter kit with the essential Philips Hue Bridge and three color-changing bulbs costs $180 /Rs 14000/--- a steep point of entry for connected lighting.

Fortunately, that color-changing kit isn't your only option. For $70/Rs 4000/- , Philips also sells a starter kit with that same Hue Bridge and a pair of plain, soft white smart bulbs. They won't change colors at all, but you can still automate them to turn on and off or dim up and down, and they'll work with all of the same third-party services as the rest of the Hue lineup, including Amazon's Alexa, Apple HomeKit, IFTTT, the Nest Learning Thermostat and more. Plus, given that the Hue Bridge typically sells for about $60 on its own, you're basically getting them for $5 each if you buy the kit, which is a heck of a deal.

The Philips Hue White LEDs are good light bulbs in their own right. Each one puts out over 800 lumens at full brightness, making them a fair replacement for a standard 60W incandescent. They're efficient, too, putting that light out from a power draw of just 9.5 watts. That's excellent, especially for a connected LED that's doing more than just emitting light.

If you take a look at the shape of the bulb itself, you'll see that it's nice and wide, extending out beyond the heat sink that makes up the bottom half. That gives it a nice, omnidirectional light output that can shine downward if you're using it in something like a bedside reading lamp.

You can choose "scenes" inside the Hue app, and the scenes are either photographs you click, or presets that are already saved in the Hue app. The three lights are then assigned different colours from the picture, and change automatically. The effect is particularly dramatic if you've got all three lights set up in the same room; when they're spread around the house, you end up with different rooms of different colours, but it doesn't set the scene in the same way.

You can also change the intensity and the hue of each light individually, and this allows you to fine tune scenes if you want. If you want to set the mood in each room, setting the lights to dramatically different colours can be easy, and actually pretty fun to do. From a practical perspective though, you're not going to want to change the lights colours routinely - once you find the right setting for each light, you're likely to only want to switch it on or off.