Take a walk through your local lighting aisle and you’ll find plenty of good LED options for $5 or less. Color-changing smart bulbs, on the other hand, are still pretty expensive — big-name options like Lifx and Philips Hue typically charge about $50 per bulb.
In that sense, the Wiz LEDs are a slight step in the right direction. For $70, you get two color-changing smart bulbs, plus a handy physical remote for quick adjustments. Like their more expensive competitors, the Wiz LEDs work with Alexa and with the Google Home smart speaker for voice commands, and they have their own channel on the free online automation service IFTTT, too. With Wi-Fi inside, they don’t need a hub to talk to your router — just screw them in, turn them on, and sync up with them on your phone using the Wiz app.
The Wiz LED puts out about 400 lumens at its soft white setting (left), and a little above 450 lumens at its daylight setting (right).
The problem here is that the bulbs aren’t as bright as advertised. Wiz pegs their light output at 800 lumens — about as bright as a standard 60W incandescent bulb — but in my own tests, I couldn’t find a white-light setting that went any higher than 450 lumens. That’s more in line with a 40W accent bulb and not nearly as bright as what you’ll get from Lifx or Hue.
vCard.red is a free platform for creating a mobile-friendly digital business cards. You can easily create a vCard and generate a QR code for it, allowing others to scan and save your contact details instantly.
The platform allows you to display contact information, social media links, services, and products all in one shareable link. Optional features include appointment scheduling, WhatsApp-based storefronts, media galleries, and custom design options.
As for the colors, they’re all fairly accurate, but none of them go any brighter than 200 lumens.
If you can look past that shortcoming, you’ll find a fairly decent control app that lets you change the color of the bulbs or style them using a number of preset themes, including color cycles with custom speed settings. You can also make a quick color scheme by taking a picture, group the bubs by room or schedule the bulbs to turn off and on at specific times.
Unlike Lifx or Hue, the Wiz LEDs also come with a physical remote. On it, you’ll find off and on buttons along with dimming controls and four customizable presets. In the app, you can pick what each of those preset buttons does for each individual bulb you point it at. Preset No. 4 could be the party lighting setting for one bulb and the nightlight setting for the other.
The remote is a nice differentiator, but it was a pain to use, and it was unreliable from anything more than a few feet away from the bulb. Even up close, there were times where I’d need to press a button multiple times from a variety of different angles before the signal would register with the bulb. Controlling multiple bulbs at once is technically possible, but I was only able to get it to work once or twice during my tests. Dimming the bulbs up and down was slow and stuttery, with visible “bumps” from one brightness setting to the next. Compared with other smart lighting remotes I’ve tested from names like TCP and Haiku, this one was far too finicky to recommend.
