- Philips is launching a ceiling light that mimics the look of a real skylight
- It automatically adjusts daylight temperature as the day goes on
- The skylight looks very realistic, but lacks smart home support
Philips is one of our favorite home lighting brands, and it’s launching a new ceiling light that mimics daylight and creates the effect of a skylight — and it looks spectacular.
The Philips Skylight is designed to replicate natural lighting and outdoor environments indoors, using a blend of advanced LED and Philips’ NatureConnect technologies. Signify, Philips’ manufacturer, says the skylight is “inspired by the natural brightness, depth and rhythm of sunlight”.
It’s a great option for windowless rooms if the design of your roof doesn’t allow you to fit a skylight, or you want to save yourself the hassle and expense of having one fitted.
Before now, Signify limited the Philips Skylight to professional settings (offices, medical environments, and so on), but now the ceiling light will be available for everyone when it launches later this month in most regions (Signify says the Skylight be available in the US in September).
The Philips Skylight comes in four models: the Philips Skylight Medium, Philips Skylight Large, Philips Skylight VitaUp Medium, and Philips Skylight VitaUp Large, with prices starting at 499.99 euros (about $580 / £430).
Each variant comes with a slim ceiling profile for mounting, a remote control, five preset lighting scenes, and Philips’ Day Rhythm tool which automatically adjusts color temperature and brightness throughout the day. All models have an IP44 rating, meaning the Philips Skylight can be fitted in bathrooms and other humid environments.
The VitaUp models come with an integrated UV-B module built to support the body’s natural vitamin D production indoors. This also includes a handful of safety measures, including automatic shut-off which happens after eight hours.
In images shared by Philips, the Skylight’s outdoor light imitation looks surprisingly convincing, and there are obvious benefits for wellbeing. More people are spending more time indoors and out of natural daylight, so devices like this are becoming increasingly sought after.
However, despite its cleverness, the Philips Skylight is not a Hue product. Philips produces some of the best smart lights out there, but its new ceiling light doesn’t offer smart connectivity. This means it doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi or work with Matter over Thread, so you can’t integrate it into your existing smart home setup, and you’ll have to use the included remote to control it manually.
Given how impressive the Philips Skylight looks, and its price tag, that’s a shame. Let’s hope Philips adds smart home connectivity to a future version.
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rowan.davies@futurenet.com (Rowan Davies)
