Philips Hue Secure Floodlight Camera review: Excellent light, average camera

There are a lot of important features to consider when shopping for a new security camera, like power source (battery or hardwired) and installation location. (Good indoor security cameras generally don’t need as much reinforcement as outdoor ones.) As far as great outdoor security cameras go, Philips Hue has made a contribution to the home security space.

Philips Hue’s Secure Floodlight Camera boasts considerable illumination and would look great on garages, porches, and other high-traffic outdoor areas. However, looking more closely at the camera’s specs is essential to determine if this product prioritizes style over substance. So, let’s find out how this model stacks up.

Price, availability, and specs

Retailing for $350, Philips Hue’s Secure Floodlight Camera can be found through a couple of online retailers. Best Buy sells the floodlight cam, but Philips’ own storefront is a good place to shop as well. Note that you’ll also need to purchase screws for mounting the floodlight cam as they aren’t included — unless you have a coffee can full of assorted screws already.

What’s good about the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight Camera?

Camera swivels horizontally, floodlight hinges vertically

The Philips Hue Secure Floodlight Camera is unique, visually speaking. It boasts a high-quality metal build with a sleek black profile. Compared to other floodlight camera duos from competing brands, which often use two distinct bulbs flanking the camera, nothing looks quite like the Hue Secure. It has a rectangular light panel above the camera. (In contrast, the Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight is another unusually designed cam-floodlight, choosing to situate the lens inside the floodlight panel. This is an older option, but even as a four-year-old camera, it remains a strong choice thanks to the 2K vision and max-3,000-lumen brightness.)

Installation is as expected for a wired floodlight or camera, although the Hue Secure’s package does not come with screws — typical, but still annoying practice. You’ll face some serious obstacles if wires aren’t already laid for an outdoor light on your home or outbuilding because this cam only has wired power. The camera magnetically attaches to the mount, so at least that step is effortless.

The floodlight hinges on a vertical axis, which is fantastic. With a maximum brightness of 2,250 lumens, the puddle of light that spills across a 25 to 30-foot arc clearly illuminates the camera’s black-and-white nighttime video and also acts as a great nightlight when you arrive home in the evening. The LED light panel can also be changed to any color, and through the Hue app, the user can select multiple colors and brightnesses for different times of day. The light can even flash as a sort of visual stunner to scare lurkers away.

I can think of a few advanced uses for the color-changing floodlight, but the Hue app doesn’t seem capable of them. For example, you could set a blue spotlight for animal motion detection and pink for cars, or green for known faces and red for unknown. The former example requires intelligent motion detection, which is paywalled for this cam. The latter requires facial recognition, which isn’t an available feature at all.

What’s bad about the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight Camera?

1080p on a $350 camera is a tough sell

First, the cables dangling freely underneath the camera are a bit of an eyesore. It’s not an installation mistake; they just hang like that.

The camera’s quality is good, but not superb. I installed it on a metal quonset, overlooking the property’s driveway, which sees a fair amount of activity — but usually at 15 feet away or greater. Had I been a typical consumer, I wouldn’t have been thrilled with the Hue Secure Floodlight Cam in this location. As the screenshot below shows, my father-in-law’s face is unintelligible, muddled by distance. He’s roughly 20 to 25 feet away from the camera.

But I wouldn’t write off the Hue Secure entirely. It’s an excellent camera for closer quarters, like on a porch or deck. It would do very well in environments where monitoring is within a 15 to 20 foot radius.

A word of caution for homeowners with an expansive Philips Hue smart light system: The Hue Secure Floodlight Camera conveniently joins the Hue network, where you can put it on group schedules, control lights en masse, and more. When the floodlight cam is synced with other Hue lights on the network, you’ll want to double-check that other lights aren’t set up to react to motion detected by the floodlight camera, because this will wake up all of your home’s Hue lights — and, consequentially, your entire home in general. A moth being detected by the Hue camera demonstrates this below.

Adding the device to the Hue app, the camera specifically, is another minor gripe. The smart floodlight and camera may be a pair, but they’re controlled independently of each other on the app, and thus are added to Hue separately. Despite the in-app button for adding a new light to the Philips Hue app being front and center, you have to dig into the app settings to add a camera. It seems like the Hue interface, which was initially created for and refined to control smart lights, still hasn’t fully welcomed Philips’ relatively new security camera component.

I was also frustrated with the Google Assistant integration. You can’t view the camera’s live feed on any Nest Hubs or in the Google Home app, forcing you to use the Hue app to check the feed. And there aren’t local storage options with the Philips Hue Secure Floodlight Cam. Paid cloud archives are the only way to access old footage.

Should you buy it?

It’s a toss up

With an excellent floodlight and a fine camera, the Philips Hue Secure cam-light duo average out to be decent. Ultimately, the problem with the Hue Secure is that one half of this pair is more capable than the other; the floodlight’s coverage radius is larger than the camera’s. The difference won’t be as stark if the Hue Secure is installed in a more confined space, like on a deck, where the camera’s lack of 2K video or digital zoom wouldn’t impede its usefulness.

I’d point shoppers with a more open space, like a yard or long driveway, to the Reolink Argus 4 Pro. It doesn’t have floodlights, but the long-distance performance is unparalleled. Besides, you can buy Reolink’s add-on floodlight and still get 4K, solar-powered, 180-degree surveillance for less than what the Philips Hue Secure will cost you.

This camera floodlight is only the best option if you have an existing Hue smart light network and the prerequisite wiring. Any deviation from those two circumstances and other options offer more for less. Philips Hue’s camera is a fine performer indoors, where its weak long-distance performance doesn’t matter, and its 1080p resolution is more competitive. In the outside realm, though, there are a lot of options, most with higher resolution and more sophisticated features. Maybe Philips Hue will someday step out with a more distinguished line of outdoor security cameras that beef up the specs to stay in the game.