Cree Connected Max LED review: Smart, color-changing light for just $10

After making a name for itself in the lighting aisle by selling
low-cost LED lite bulbs with decade-long warranties, Cree Lighting is back at it with a new line of automatable bulbs that change colors and connect with vox administration — no hub necessary. Pricing starts at $eight for a dimmable white-light smart bulb, or $x for a dimmable bulb that can change colors. That’s the lowest price I’ve ever seen for a name-brand color-changer, beating out
our current summit bargain bulb, the $thirteenPhilips Wiz Connected LED.

The new bulbs are called Cree Connected Max LEDs — they’re Cree Lighting’s first smart bulbs since Cree sold its consumer lighting sectionalization to Ideal Industries in 2022, and the first Cree-branded smart bulbs since the arrival ofthe original Cree Connected LED 5 years ago. Similar that bulb, the new Max LEDs are designed to work with multiple platforms, including Alexa and Google Assistant, and cheers to the fact that each ane uses its ain built-in Wi-Fi radio, they can practise so without demand for any additional hub hardware.

That’s a marked improvement from the original bulbs, which required a Zigbee hub or a bridge device connected to your router in order to interpret their signals into something your home network could work with. The new Max bulbs can skip all of that and send signals direct to your router on the 2.4GHz ring. The ones I tested did so simply fine, making them an easy and affordable smart lighting pick for Alexa- and Google-powered smart homes.

The new lineup

Along with white-light smart bulbs for $8 and full-color smart bulbs for $10, Cree Lighting’s new smart lighting lineup includes color-changing indoor and outdoor floodlights, along with an extra-bright, 100-watt replacement bulb that changes colors, too. Here’due south the full list, as detailed on an Amazon landing page:

• Cree Connected Max LED
  (dimmable white light, A19 shape, sixty-watt replacement): $8
• Cree Connected Max LED
  (dimmable full-color low-cal, A19 shape, 60-watt replacement): $10
• Cree Connected Max LED
  (dimmable full-color light, A21 shape, 100-watt replacement): $13
• Cree Continued Max LED
  (dimmable full-color lite, BR30 floodlight shape, 65-watt replacement): $xiii
• Cree Continued Max LED
  (dimmable full-color light, PAR38 outdoor floodlight shape, 120-watt replacement): $17

Per the specs on the box, the $ten, total-color lx-watt replacement seedling puts out 800 lumens at peak brightness from a power draw of nine watts, and would add simply over $1 to your energy beak each year with an average of three hours of use per day. Along with Wi-Fi, the bulbs include Bluetooth radios for easier pairing with sure platforms.

App setup and phonation control

To become started with Cree Lighting’s new bulbs, you’ll screw them in, plow them on and pair them with the Cree Lighting app for Android and iOS. That’southward a modify from the original Cree smart bulbs, which didn’t offer an app of their own at all.

The app isn’t as sophisticated or intuitive as apps from names similar Lifx and Philips Hue that have been effectually for a lot longer, but connecting with the bulbs is still pretty simple — only tap the plus icon and follow the instructions. The bulbs require a two.4GHz Wi-Fi network and won’t work on the 5GHz band, and the app cautions that some routers that join the two bands into a single, unified network might cause problem during setup. I employ a unified network like that, and I had no trouble at all, but I even so appreciated that the app includes troubleshooting help for several specific brands of router.

From there, you can enable Cree Lighting in the Alexa and Google Home apps if you want to showtime controlling the bulbs with a voice banana. With Alexa, you lot’ll need to enable the Cree Lighting skill in guild to permit Alexa discover them — with Google Assistant, but search for “Cree Lighting” in the Google Home app’s listing of supported brands to link your account and add your bulbs.

Lots of people will stop correct there and just use their voice assistant of pick to plough the lights on and off or change their color. If that sounds like yous, then you’ll probably never need to call back well-nigh the app again. That said, along with basic control of your bulbs, the Cree Lighting app also offers scheduling, scenes, wake-upwardly lighting, themed presets for holidays and special occasions and a “Follow the Sun” mode that’ll set your bulbs to mimic the natural progression of sunlight throughout the day.

That’south more than plenty features for a bargain-price smart bulb, but I’d however beloved it if Cree Lighting would add the ability to customize fade durations whenever you turn a bulb on or trigger a scene. A vacation style that automatically cycles your lights on and off to simulate occupancy when you aren’t dwelling house would be some other nice inclusion, too.

The other omission of note: Apple tree HomeKit support. The Cree Connected Max bulbs don’t include it, then you wont be able to connect them with Siri or automate them alongside other HomeKit-friendly devices.

Performance

I didn’t have whatever trouble testing these bulbs out over the by few weeks. I was able to pair each of them with my dwelling house network on the first try, and none of them dropped out of my control later that. Scheduled automations e’er ran as scheduled in the app, consummate with the optional button notifications, and decision-making them via Alexa and Google Assistant worked just too as with every other smart bulb I’ve tested.

That’s the truly important thing to keep in mind here — so long as the bulbs y’all’re using piece of work every bit promised, your feel decision-making your lights with Alexa or Google Assistant won’t really vary much at all from make to brand. You ask for the lights to come on, and the lights come on. You enquire for the lights to turn royal, and the lights plough imperial. Fancier lights from names like Lifx and Philips Hue might offering avant-garde features like music visualization or entertainment lighting that syncs with whatever’s playing on your Tv, but as far as basic lighting control is concerned, give me the $10 option every day of the week.

That said, you’ll definitely notice it if your lights aren’t bright enough, or if the colors don’t wait true. Fortunately, Cree Lighting’southward bulbs practice a fine job putting out plenty of brightness — especially the 100W-replacement bulb, which nets y’all 1,600 lumens of effulgence for just $thirteen.

I don’t have access to my lighting lab these days, so I’ll take to hold off on checking the lumen counts for myself (expect an update hither when that changes), only to the naked centre, I didn’t see whatever funky-looking colors, and I didn’t see whatsoever settings that appeared also dim.

My only quibble: The white light spectrum for each bulb strongly favors the low, yellowy end of the spectrum. Yous’ll have to dial up all the way to maximum daylight if you desire anything approaching blue-white. On the colour side of things, that also ways that the cyan setting isn’t quite as icy-blue as I would similar.

The verdict

LED light bulbs aren’t luxuries anymore — even the ones that change colors and connect with voice assistants. Forth with Cree Lighting, new color-changing smart bulbs from
GE,
Philips Wiz, and
Nanoleaf
are all available for $xx or less. Honestly, you’d exist fine just getting any’s on auction, provided it works with your platforms of choice.

Among them, the $10 Cree Connected Max LED is the cheapest, it works exactly every bit advertised and you can upgrade to an extra-bright 100W-replacement version for just $3 more. It doesn’t support Apple HomeKit, so you should await elsewhere if you desire Siri in charge of your lights, just outside of that, it’s easy to recommend, especially for Alexa- and Google Assistant-powered smart homes.