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Philips Hue lights will soon gain a brightness balancer and automation enhancements

Philips Hue customers will soon have a new way to control lighting around the home. Signify will add a new brightness feature through an update to the Philips Hue app. Users will also have access to expanded automation tools.

Brightness balancer

In response to customer feedback, Philips Hue lights are gaining a new feature called the brightness balancer. This feature lets you fine-tune light brightness within an Entertainment area in the Philips Hue app on iPhone and Android.

The brightness balancer is specifically designed to make setting brightness levels easier in setups that have Philips Hue bulbs with different lumen levels. For example, 30% brightness on an 800 lumen bulb doesn’t match 30% brightness of a 1000 lumen bulb or 270 lumen light strips. Brightness balancing solves this.

“Using the brightness balancer, you can make lights that have higher lumens dim lower than lights with lower lumens,” says Signify.

5x automation

Philips Hue motion sensors currently support two time slots for automating lighting conditions. With an upcoming update to the Philips Hue bridge, users will be able to customize Philips Hue lighting conditions with a total of 10 time slots.

This means motion sensors can trigger 10 different lighting conditions based on what time of day motion is detected. Signify adds that the Philips Hue “Natural light scene can be selected as part one of these time slots, to mimic the sun throughout the day.”

Both updates are coming to existing Philips Hue lights and motion sensors as soon as this summer.

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Avatar for Zac Hall Zac Hall

Zac covers Apple news, hosts the 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcast, and created SpaceExplored.com.

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