Philips Hue Secure Floodlight review: Great light, average camera

Philips Hue is arguably the biggest name in smart lighting. The company has been producing excellent smart lighting products for many years. And though Philips Hue products aren’t the cheapest option, they’re still very popular thanks to their high quality.

The company isn’t resting on its laurels, however. In 2023, Philips Hue expanded its product range to include security cameras, and now in 2024 it’s adding a new security product. The Philips Hue Secure Floodlight is a combination floodlight and security camera that’s designed to protect your home from the outside.

There are already smart floodlight cameras on the market, such as the Google Nest Cam with Floodlight, so what does the new Philips Hue product have to offer? We put the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight through its paces to find out.

Philips Hue Secure Floodlight

The Philips Hue Secure Floodlight has the quality you expect from a Philips Hue product, with a bright floodlight that you can turn to any color you wish. The included security camera offers good quality and features such as package detection and activity zones available with a subscription. However, there’s currently no way to see the live feed outside the Hue app, and no support for HomeKit Secure Video.

Pros

• Bright floodlight in any color
• Customizable motion activation
• Decent camera

Cons

• Expensive
• No live streaming to smart displays
• No HomeKit Secure Video support

Price, specs and availability

The Secure Flood Light Camera is available to buy 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 mounting and floodlight look stylish enough that you won’t cringe about mounting them to the exterior of your home. The camera sits below the floodlight and features a sleek look as well. The only slight flaw in the looks department is that the power cable and tether for the camera dangle down a little below the camera, but this isn’t a huge issue.

Installation

Fairly painless if you have outside power

The Philips Hue Secure Floodlight needs to be hard-wired; there’s no battery option available. This means you’ll need to mount it somewhere where you have existing external wiring. If you don’t have anywhere appropriate, you may need to get the help of an electrician, especially if you don’t feel confident working with electrical wires.

If you do have existing wiring (for example, if you’re replacing an existing floodlight), then installing the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight isn’t too onerous, and takes about ten to fifteen minutes to do.

The instructions aren’t the most helpful, consisting only of images with no accompanying text, but they’re fairly simple to follow. The floodlight can be angled to point in a specific direction, and the camera is attached by magnet, allowing you to point it at a 60-degree angle in any direction.Annoyingly, once the floodlight is in place, you’ll be asked to

scan QR codes
which are fairly inaccessible now that you’ve installed the device. Thankfully, copies of those codes are also on stickers on the front of the manual, so make sure you keep them on hand.Once you’ve installed the floodlight and powered it up, you can easily add the device using the Hue app. You add the floodlight and camera separately as the Hue app sees them as individual devices. The instructions in the app are simple to follow.You’ll need a


Hue Bridge
in order to set up and control your Philips Hue Secure Floodlight, which is sold separately. However, if you already own other Hue products, you probably already have a Hue Bridge.

Performance

Decent camera and great lighting

The heart of the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight is the powerful 2,250 lumen floodlight. As with many other Hue products, this floodlight doesn’t just offer bright white light, however. You can choose from almost any color you can imagine. This can be very useful. Moreover, the light is more than powerful enough to illuminate a significant area outside your home.

The attached camera offers 1080p capture with a 141.2-degree field of view, which I found wide enough for my needs. It also features two-way talk through the Hue app, and you can trigger an alarm that will flash the floodlight and make a loud sound through the camera.

Picture quality is good, with enough detail to make out faces even at a distance. You can zoom in on the live feed and recordings and the quality is good enough to get a good look at the faces of any potential intruders.

Night vision quality is excellent too; there’s little difference in the picture quality when using the camera’s night vision with the floodlight off compared to the image at night when the floodlight is on. Yo easily see what’s going on outside your home even during the dark of the night.

Features

Highly customizable motion activation

One of the most common uses of a floodlight is to illuminate the outside of your home when motion is detected. This is useful for helping you find your way back into your home when it’s dark and is also a good deterrent for potential intruders or unwanted visitors of a furrier kind.

You can use the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight as a motion-activated light, but it does require some setup. Since the camera and light are treated as individual devices, you’ll need to go into the camera settings in the Hue app and activate the Trigger Lights toggle. You can then choose the light you want to turn on when motion is detected. The clever part is that in the app you can customize the behavior of the light. You can have it turn on in any color or scene that you want, at any brightness you want, have it revert to the previous state when it was last on, or have it do nothing.

You can also create multiple time slots and have different behaviors for each slot. For example, I’ve set up the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight to turn on at medium brightness in a blue light after 10 pm at night. This is more than enough light to see by, without turning on a blazing white light every time a leaf blows past the camera. The customization is really useful and sets the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight apart from many other motion-activated floodlights. There is also a daylight sensitivity setting that you can tweak so that the light won’t come on when it’s light outside.

The camera offers 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. The person notifications are solid; I’ve seen far fewer false positives than I get with my Ring video doorbell, and you can adjust the sensitivity if you’re getting too many or too few notifications.

The Secure plans offer other features, too. You get live-streaming, standard motion notifications, end-to-end video encryption, blackout zones, and video snapshots for free. The Basic plan, which costs $40 per camera per year, adds 30 days of video history, activity zones, as well as the advanced motion detection features mentioned above. The Plus plan, which costs $100 per year for as many cameras as you wish, ups the video history to 60 days.

Activity zones is a feature that’s only available with a Secure plan, but it’s a useful one. It allows you to create one or more zones which the camera will monitor for motion. Any motion outside these zones is ignored. For example, if your camera is pointing at your front gate, and you regularly have cars driving past it, you can create an activity zone that excludes the area where the cars pass, so that you don’t get a continual stream of motion detection alerts.

Another useful security measure is the Take Action feature. If you notice anything untoward on your camera, you can tap the 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 call a pre-set emergency contact number, or directly call emergency services.

Smart home integrations

Lacking in video streaming

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

The bad news is that the security camera is not currently compatible with Alexa, Google Assistant, or HomeKit. If you were hoping to be able to view your camera feed on your Echo Show, for example, then you’re out of luck. The only way to do so is through the Hue app.

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

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

Verdict

Hue has always had a reputation for making great lights and the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight is no exception. It’s a break from the norm to find a motion-activated floodlight that can shine nearly any color you can imagine. This is useful for providing low-level lighting at night, but you can use the floodlight for other uses too, such as adding a pop of color to your home’s exterior during the holidays.

The security camera also does a good job, with decent 1080p picture quality. It’s a shame that, at least for the moment, there’s no way to view the camera feed other than through the Hue app. Support for smart displays such as an Amazon Echo Show or Google Nest Hub would make the camera more useful. The lack of support for HomeKit Secure Video means that if you want to save recordings, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege.

Philips Hue Secure Floodlight

Setting up the light to work as a motion-activated floodlight also takes a little time, but once you’ve done so, you have some impressive customization options to make your floodlight respond exactly how you want it to.

Philips Hue products have never been cheap, but the excellent quality usually means that they’re worth the price. If you just intend to use the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight as a motion-activated light for your home, then it’s an impressive, if slightly expensive, option. However, the lack of support for the camera is a real shame; the ability to stream the camera feed to a smart display, or support for HomeKit Secure Video, would turn this product from a good one into an excellent one. Philips Hue will add at least some of those features in the future.