FabianAlthough I suspect that something will happen soon in this direction, Philips Hue has not yet managed to equip a filament lamp with White Ambiance technology. Up to now, the original Philips Hue filament lamps have a fixed colour temperature of 2,100 Kelvin. Fortunately, there are third-party suppliers who, thanks to the ZigBee standard, offer lamps compatible with the Hue Bridge that can do just that.
A few weeks ago Müller-Licht Tint delivered two filament lamps with White Ambiance technology, in which the filaments are arranged in a spiral. That wasn't bad at all. Now there is an even better alternative with two new models from the Dutch manufacturer Icasa. At first glance, the lamps look very similar, but there are still some significant differences. First of all we start with a small optical overview.
On the picture you can see on the left the Globe filament from Müller-Licht Tint, in the middle the Philips Hue White Globe filament and on the right the new Icasa Spiral filament in the 95 millimeter Globe shape.
What I like a lot: With the third party products, the base disappears completely into the socket of the luminaire; with the original from Philips Hue, a little plastic still sticks out. A comparison between Müller-Licht Tint and Icasa is notable: The spirally arranged LED band is a bit longer in Icasa and makes one more turn. This looks a bit more stylish, especially when switched on.
By the way, the longer LED strip light not only has a visual advantage, but also makes itself felt in another detail: The Icasa light source is 100 lumens brighter than the Tint filament, simply because more individual LEDs are used. At 480 lumens, the new Icasa lamp is only 70 lumens darker than the filament lamps from Philips Hue.
The colour temperature of the Icasa filament can be adjusted from 1,800 to 4,00 Kelvin
The White Ambiance technique is realised as follows: The filament string, which optically appears as one unit, consists of two LED strips. One of them has cold white LEDs, the other warm white LEDs. The two white tones are simply mixed, so that the Icasa filament lamps can be adjusted from 1,800 to 4,000 Kelvin. You can see what this looks like on the following three pictures.
When manually adjusting the color temperature, Icasa's filament lamps reveal their only weakness: If you slowly move the slider in the Hue app from warm white to cold white, the unused LED band at the edge of the setting range suddenly switches on and off – the transition could well be smoother. But I'm sure that you won't even notice this little mistake in everyday life, so I won't deduct any points for this.
At a price of 24,95 Euro for a globe-filament or 32,95 Euro for a double pack of the standard filament, one cannot grumble at Icasa in any case. For me, the illuminants are still a touch better than what Müller-Licht Tint presented us a few weeks ago. So if you are looking for stylish filament bulbs with adjustable color temperature, you are in good hands with Icasa.
The distribution is currently started in Germany, but soon the lamps will also be available in other European countries.
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Hi.
Thank you for this nice blog. As Philips does not propose Filament bulbs with white ambiance, I am focusing on the iCasa and Tint bulbs. Could you tell me if we can control the iCasa and Tint bulbs with a Philips Hue Dim Switch ?
Thats no problem. Everything works fine except HomeKit and Hue Entertainment with those bulbs from iCasa or Tint.