Spreading all of your lighting solutions throughout a smart home configuration can be fun. Especially, if you are balancing out your living room or theater with a fun colorful presence. The only issue most users come across is that not all lights or bulbs are created equal when it comes to brightness. This is where a new “brightness balancer” from Philips Hue looks to resolve this.
Let’s say you have a number of Philips Hue products spread about the room. Maybe a gradient light strip for the back of the TV that responds to whatever is on the screen. Maybe some table lamps, bulbs for your hanging fixtures, and more. However, when you group them together and tell them as a group to dim to 50%, they may not all match.
This is typically because some lights have a higher lumen count than others. Say if one has an 800lm max and another has a 400lm max, the 800lm product is going to be brighter than the other if both are brought to 50% (just do the math in your head). The result is some fancy requirements in your smart home setup to compensate and that is only if you are knowledgably enough to create them (ie, deep automations/scenes that manage each individual light separately when activated).
Philips looks to eliminate this complication by releasing its upcoming “brightness balancer” that will balance the lights based on their individual brightnesses and not a generalized group percentage. Allowing all of the lights to match each other, creating a comfortable environment that doesn’t require any special coding or deep automations to make happen.
So instead, both the 400lm and 800lm light can dim to 200lm together, evenly. Or whatever other settings or scenarios you need your lights to be in. You can spotlight parts of the room and more.
The company plans to launch the brightness balancer (the name is shared by the company in lower case, so this likely won’t be the actual name of the product but simply a description of what it does for now) sometime in Q3 of this year (2023). Pricing information is not yet available.
