Philips Hue Secure Floodlight review: good light, average camera

Philips Hue is arguably the most well-known brand in smart lighting. The company has been producing excellent smart lighting products for many years. Although Philips Hue products are not the cheapest option, they are still popular due to their high quality.

However, the company is not resting on its laurels. In 2023, Philips Hue expanded its product range to include security cameras, and now in 2024 it is adding new security products. Philips Hue Secure floodlights are a combination floodlight and security camera designed to protect your home from the outside world.

There are already smart floodlight cameras on the market, such as the Google Nest Cam with Floodlight, so what do the new Philips Hue products offer? We put the Philips Hue Secure floodlight to the test to find out.

Prices, specifications and availability

The Secure Flood Light Camera is available now from the Philips Hue website for $350.

design

Philips Hue products usually have a sleek and modern look, and the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight is no exception. The mounts and floodlights look stylish enough that you won’t feel intimidated by installing them on the exterior of your home. The camera is located under the floodlight and looks stylish. The only minor cosmetic flaw is that the camera’s power cord and tether hangs a little below the camera, but it’s not a huge issue.

Install

Pretty painless if you have an external power source

The Philips Hue Secure Floodlight requires hardwiring; no battery option is available. This means you need to install it where there is existing external wiring. If you don’t have a suitable place, you may want to seek help from an electrician, especially if you’re not confident with working with electrical wires.

If you do have existing wiring (for example, if you’re replacing an existing floodlight), then installing a Philips Hue Secure floodlight isn’t too much of a hassle and should take around ten to fifteen minutes to complete.

Performance

Nice camera and great lighting

At the heart of the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight is a powerful 2,250 lumen floodlight. However, like many other Hue products, this floodlight doesn’t just provide bright white light. You can choose almost any color you can imagine. This is very useful. Additionally, the light is strong enough to illuminate important areas outside your home.

The included camera offers 1080p shooting and a 141.2-degree field of view, which I found to be adequate for my needs. It also features two-way talking via the Hue app, and you can trigger alarms, flash floodlights and make loud sounds through the camera.

Image quality is good, with enough detail to be seen even from a distance. You can zoom in on live streams and recordings, with the quality good enough to clearly see the faces of any potential intruders.

Night vision quality is also excellent; there’s almost no difference in image quality when using the camera’s night vision feature with the floodlights off compared to images at night with the floodlights on. Even in the dark of night, you can easily see what’s going on outside your home.

feature

Highly customizable motion activation

One of the most common uses for floodlights is to illuminate the exterior of a home when motion is detected. This will help you find your way home when it gets dark, and is also a good deterrent to potential intruders or unwelcome visitors of the furrier type.

You can use the Philips Hue Secure floodlight as a motion-activated light, but it does require some setup.Since the camera and lights are considered separate devices, you’ll need to go into the camera settings in the Hue app and activate trigger light switch. You can then choose which lights to turn on when motion is detected. The neat part is that within the app you can customize the behavior of the lights. You can have it open in any color or scene you want, at any brightness you want, have it return to the state it was in when it was last turned on, or have it do nothing.

You can also create multiple time periods and set different behaviors for each time period. For example, I set my Philips Hue Secure floodlight to emit blue light at medium brightness after 10pm. This is enough for people to see without having to turn on a blazing white light every time a leaf blows past the camera. The customization features are very useful and set the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight apart from many other motion-activated floodlights. There’s also a daylight sensitivity setting that you can adjust so that the lights don’t come on when there’s plenty of light outside.

The camera provides motion notifications that will appear on your phone when motion is detected. You get standard motion notifications for free, but if you sign up for a paid Hue Secure plan, you also get person, animal, vehicle, and package detection. Personal notifications are reliable; I noticed far fewer false alarms than with my Ring video doorbell, and you can adjust the sensitivity if you get too many or too few notifications.

Security plans offer other features as well. You get live streaming, standard action notifications, end-to-end video encryption, blackout zones, and video snapshots for free. The basic plan, priced at $40 per camera per year, adds 30 days of video history, activity zones, and the aforementioned advanced motion detection features. The Plus plan costs $100 per year, buys as many cameras as you want, and extends video history to 60 days.

Activity Zones is a feature only available in the Security plan, but it’s a useful one. It allows you to create one or more areas where the camera will monitor movement. Any movement outside these areas is ignored. For example, if your camera is pointed at the front door and cars drive by frequently, you can create an active zone that excludes areas where cars drive by so you don’t get a continuous stream of motion detection alerts.

Another useful security measure is the “Take Action” feature.If you notice anything unusual about the camera, you can click Take action button. This gives you the option to sound an alarm and flash the lights to deter any unwanted visitors. There are also quick action buttons that allow you to dial preset emergency contact numbers, or call emergency services directly.

Smart home integration

Lacks video streaming

If you’re looking to add the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight to your smart home setup, here’s some good news and bad news. The good news is that the floodlight is compatible with Alexa and Google Assistant. It also works with HomeKit over Matter. I was able to easily add the floodlight to Alexa and the Apple Home app, allowing me to control the power, brightness, and color with my voice. Response is almost instantaneous.

The bad news is that the security camera isn’t currently compatible with Alexa, Google Assistant, or HomeKit. For example, if you want to be able to view camera information on your Echo Show, you’re out of luck. The only way is through the Hue app.

This also means there’s no support for HomeKit Secure Video; you’ll have to pay a Hue subscription fee if you want to access your recordings.

Support for viewing live footage on Alexa and Google Assistant devices may be added in the future, but it’s unlikely we’ll see HomeKit support until security cameras are added to the Matter standard.

judgment

Hue has always been known for making great lights, and the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight is no exception. It’s time to think outside the box and find a motion-activated floodlight that emits almost any color you can imagine. This is useful for providing low-level lighting at night, but you can also use floodlights for other purposes, such as adding a pop of color to the exterior of your home during the holidays.

The security camera also performs well, with decent 1080p image quality. Unfortunately, at least for now, there’s no other way to view the camera feed other than through the Hue app. Support for smart displays like the Amazon Echo Show or Google Nest Hub will make the camera even more useful. The lack of support for HomeKit Secure Video means that if you want to save your recordings, you’ll have to pay for this permission.

Setting up the light as a motion-activated floodlight also takes some time, but once it’s done, you have some impressive customization options at your disposal to make the floodlight respond exactly the way you want.

Philips Hue products are never cheap, but their superior quality often means they’re worth every penny. If you’re just going to use the Philips Hue Secure floodlight as a motion-activated light in your home, it’s an impressive, albeit slightly more expensive, option. The lack of camera support is a real shame, however; the ability to stream camera input to a smart display, or support for HomeKit Secure Video, would take this product from a great product to a great one. Philips Hue will add at least some of these features in the future.