Whether you’re looking to finally jump on the smart home bandwagon and start buying some connected bulbs, or you’re just rounding out some lights around the house, Sylvania’s latest partnership with LEDVANCE wants your attention.
This new Smart+ collection from both companies is aiming to deliver an easy smart bulb experience on a budget that’ll tie into your existing Google Home or Alexa setup. The full collection includes a few different kinds of lights, so we’re digging in to see how all of them hold up, whether you just need a couple new lights or you’re planning on lighting up every room in your home.
Sylvania LED Smart Bulb
The backbone of the Smart+ collection is the four-pack of A19 color LED bulbs. These are your very basic, regular lights that’ll work in most lamps and sockets around your house, and they’re fully RGB and can be tuned from cooler to warmer whites, depending on what you’re going after.
They’re very solid lights that are competitively priced at $35 (making them slightly less than $9 per bulb) that easily integrate into your Google Home app and respond to Alexa commands. They’re also incredibly bright, and noticeably more than similar bulbs.
At 100% brightness these things will illuminate every nook and cranny in your bedroom, which is great if you’re trying to find that SD card that fell off your night stand a couple weeks ago or if you’re deep cleaning and could use the extra vision. On the flip side, even when turned down to 1% brightness they don’t tend to dim as much as a comparable Philips Hue light. This may not be an issue, but it does limit their ability to get into mood lighting territory that you may want for a room besides a living room. Dim lights are great for kitchens, bedrooms, and dens, and Sylvania’s options will get the job done but they don’t excel here.
Still, though, we love the price, the ability to flood a room with light, and how easily they connect to an existing smart home setup.
Sylvania LED color light strip
Sylvania’s LED light strip is where their Smart+ collection gets more interesting. You’re getting a 6.5 foot strip that can be placed around your house for a bright, full RGB mood light. The 3M adhesive on the back means you can put this underneath some cabinets or a computer desk, behind your TV, along some floorboards, under a bed… you get the idea. Light strips are much more dynamic when they’re not stuck in a lamp, and these are no exception.
Like their A19 counterparts, however, they’re extremely bright. Brighter than you’d expect from a light strip like this, but not so bright that they struggle to create softer, dim mood lighting like the regular bulbs. Setting these up underneath kitchen cabinets was my preferred way to add some atmosphere to a room that’s otherwise a little boring, and they did the trick perfectly.
And once again, these will fully integrate into your Google Home or Alexa setup, and at $29 for a 6.5 foot strip, there’s a lot of bang for your buck here. You can additionally buy another 6.5 foot expansion strip for $18, if you’ve got more surface area to cover.
LEDVANCE Smart Floor Lamp
The collaborative corner floor lamp from both Sylvania and LEDVANCE is easily my favorite product in the Smart+ collection. It’s all self-contained in a corner lamp with a 4.5 LED strip that’s controlled via the companion app or your smart assistant, and it’s probably the best product here to set some mood lighting.
It’s designed to sit in a corner and throw light against a wall, and while you don’t have to do that, it definitely creates the most ambience by filling up a corner or two of your room with soft white, cool blue, or raging red colors. It’s incredibly easy to put together by just screwing the legs together, then plug it in, pair it up, and you’re off to the races. It’s also extremely lightweight, so moving it around shouldn’t be a problem; conversely, though, you’ll want to be careful and not put this somewhere that it could easily be knocked over. The L-shaped feet work, but I wouldn’t call it sturdy.
At $79 this one’s the most expensive of the collection, but if you can swing it I definitely had the most fun setting the room with a full LED light like this.
Sylvania TruWave Light Bulbs
The TruWave light bulbs are a little more basic, foregoing any smart functionality for a design that aims to help relieve eye stress and promote better sleep and relaxation. These energy-efficient light bulbs minimize the amount of blue light coming from them and instead fire off light that’s more natural, which should make things in your room look a little more realistic and eliminate the strain that comes from blue lights. It probably won’t counteract hanging out on Twitter on your smartphone late at night, but hey, we can’t blame Sylvania for that.
While they’re a little more boring, these lights do still work very well, and at roughly $18 for a 6-pack, they’re a solid deal for anywhere that you just need reliable lights without any kind of smart connectivity. It’s a good option for guest rooms or bathrooms where you don’t benefit quite as much from connected devices, anyway.
Sylvania App
Sylvania has quite a few available apps to control some of their smart devices, but for these lights we used the Sylvania Smart WiFi app. This lets you pair bulbs, set scheduling and groups, and control everything from one place.
The good news is that while it’s kind of a plain looking app, it does work generally well at setting your lights up. Everything we tested was detected quickly, and custom schedules and grouping had no issues. There are even some preset lighting profiles you can apply to quickly try and achieve a certain mood, and the routines are pretty powerful, allowing you to change light profiles based on time of day, weather, temperature, and even wind speed.
The UX is a little weird, with some very harsh chimes from interacting with your lights, and I noticed some odd display delays and glitches while turning things on and off. For example, after an automation turned a group of lights on at 10am, the app was still showing those lights as turned off despite them definitely being turned on. I had to turn the lights on again (which didn’t do anything) then turn them back off to achieve the desired setting.
Personally, I’d recommend using the app as little as possible. These things fully integrate into your Google Home app and tie in with Amazon’s Alexa, so you can just dial up your rooms, groups, and routines from those apps that work a little better. They’re excellent, affordable lights when you take that approach, and you eliminate one of the only weak links in the experience.
Worth it?
At their current prices, these Sylvania lights are some pretty compelling options. There are a few drawbacks, like the clunky app and the bulbs’ inability to really dial down the brightness, but those feel like nitpicks more than anything.
I will note that these do not work with Apple’s HomeKit (but apparently some users have had success getting them to work with Siri Shortcuts) so anyone invested in Apple’s smart home ecosystem should do a little extra due diligence. Anyone else, though, should definitely check these out.
