Overall, the Philips Hue White bulb is the more affordable option, especially if you're buying several bulbs at once, and it'll be enough to illuminate a lot of the spaces in your home. Nevertheless, the Philips Hue White Ambiance bulb gives you more flexibility with thousands of shades of natural white light, but you likely don't need it in every single room. This is because I don’t find myself needing to switch away from bluey-white or yellowy-white very often (meaning that full color, at double the price of White Ambiance) would be overkill for me. We found ourselves relying mostly on the activity-specific defaults. ‘Energise’ was perfect for the mornings when the harsh white light worked well to blow away the cobwebs, while ‘Relax’ worked better in the evenings where we wanted our brains to wind down.

It's a breeze to start using the system and control the lights through the app. The default home screen shows you your available rooms, allowing you to control all their bulbs as a group. You can tap on the switch to the right of the screen to turn them on to their last setting, but if you’re using the default settings you’re nowhere near using the Philips Hue bulbs to their potential. The real fun starts when you tap the room’s icon on the left of the screen, which allows you to customize the exact bulb color.However Hue earn their status as a premium-end product by having a large product line-up with lots of smart bulbs and all-in-one light fixings, along with a good amount of integration. They are one of the only smart lighting companies to offer syncing with music and TV, meaning that your bulbs can ‘dance’ in time with what’s playing. Well the answer is… it’s really up to you! Read on for what I do personally, but if you think that you’d benefit from switching to bluey-whites (or pure white), white ambiance will be perfect for you. Once the app is set up, it will ask you to connect to the Hue Bridge by holding down the big button on the Bridge. When your bulbs are discovered you’ll need to assign them to rooms, which allows you to control groups of them much more easily. With your bulbs assigned to rooms, the setup process is complete and you can now play around with the colors (shades of white, in this case). And since Philips Hue’s white bulbs are “warm white” too, do you really need to upgrade to white ambiance bulbs? Both can be dimmed (and turned on/off) just fine, after all. Feature lights are a good place to use full color (White and Color Ambiance) smart bulbs, but for most of my lights I just use White Ambiance.

The final bulb type means that the bulb can produce 16 million different colors: from blue to bright orange, and pink to green! This is because these bulbs contain color diodes (RGB – one red, one green, and one blue) along with a white diode to produce good quality white color too (genuine white is hard to produce with just RGB diodes).So that’s the main difference between Hue’s White and White Ambiance bulbs: one is set to warm white, whilst the other allows you to change between different white colors. But of course, this comes at a higher price… How the Price Varies Between Hue’s White and Ambiance Bulbs But if you mainly want a bulb to dim and turn on/off with your voice, Hue White will work just fine.

If you’ve not thought about your light bulbs too much, you’ve probably been buying “warm white” bulbs for years without realizing it. These are often more common-place in shops. Then if you find that you never switch from the default color, just buy Hue White in the future and save money. Which Hue Bulbs I Buy (in Different Situations) However Hue’s color bulbs cost 4-5x the price of white bulbs and 2-3x the price of ‘white ambiance’ bulbs, so many budget-conscious people ask what the difference is between the cheaper white and white ambiance alternatives…

White light with adjustable color temperature

But equally, I dislike working in the day-time under “warm white”. It just feels a bit weird to me. Hence I avoid Hue White where I can. I have two Hue White bulbs from a starter kit, but every other Hue bulb I buy is White Ambiance (or full color, in a few rare cases). The easiest way to do this is with Philips’ pre-configured scenes, which range from ‘Energize’ (a cool white light) through to ‘Relax’ (a richer yellow hue).