LIFX SuperColor Flood Light review: Flooding the zone with color

Back from the dead, LIFX is busy rebuilding its smart-lighting portfolio, with this indoor and outdoor-capable PAR38 bulb arriving in the brand’s latest wave of releases. 

The LIFX SuperColor Flood Light is as bright and bold as advertised, complete with up to 1,600 lumens of brightness, a weatherized design, a bevy of scheduling and automation options, and support for Matter, meaning the bulb will work in Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings households. 

We’re also fans of LIFX’s clean and intuitive app, which makes it easy to create lighting scenes as well as (recently added) “routines” that let you build multi-step automations. 

Bright, colorful, weatherized, and stuffed with features, the LIFX SuperColor Flood Light is a compelling choice for smart lighting shoppers.

Giving us pause is the bulb’s lack of a vacation mode, as well as the fact that LIFX is still in rebuilding mode following a long absence (the brand was acquired by Feit Electric in 2022), meaning most of its products are now several years old. We don’t expect that situation to last for long, but those who’d rather buy into a large and robust smart ecosystem should take note. 

At $39.98, the LIFX SuperColor Flood Light sits in the middle of the market, bracketed by Philips Hue’s much pricier PAR38 color bulb and more affordable options from the likes of Cree Lighting and GE Cync. 

Design 

The LIFX SuperColor Flood Light has a typical PAR38-style design, measuring 4.92 x 4.92 x 5.2 inches (WxHxD) and weighing in at 9.5 ounces. PAR is an acronym for parabolic aluminized reflector. The bulb is fitted with an E26 base, meaning you can screw it into a typical light socket. PAR bulbs differ from their BR cousins by virtue of the more focused beam of light they produce. They’re not a spotlight, but their light is less diffused than that from a BR bulb.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lighting.

This “SuperColor” bulb can glow in up to 16 million colors (one at a time) and serves up an unusually wide range of white-color temperatures, ranging from a very warm 1,600 Kelvin (roughly the same white-color temperature as candlelight) to an extremely cool 9,000 K (a blue-sky color). Most smart color bulbs of this type restrict their white color temperatures to the 2,700-6,500K range. 

The SuperColor Flood Light is also quite bright, topping out at 1,600 lumens and with red, green, and blue colors that can reach 262, 627, and 142 lumens respectively. In my tests, the LIFX bulb had no trouble lighting up a room on its own. 

The bulb comes with an IP65 rating, meaning it’s dust-tight and is resistant to water sprayed in any direction. In other words, the light should be able to weather the elements without any issues, including rain and snow. You’ll learn everything you need to know about IP weatherization codes at the preceding link.

This Wi-Fi-enabled bulb supports Matter out of the box, meaning it will work in Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings households. It’s worth noting that the light handles Matter over Wi-Fi, not Thread, meaning the bulb must connect directly to your Wi-Fi router rather than connecting to other Thread devices in a Thread mesh network. 

Setup 

To get the LIFX SuperColor Floor Light up and running, you’ll need its Matter QR code, which is stamped on the base of the bulb as well as on the last page of the user manual; you’ll need the code to pair the bulb with other smart home apps. 

You’ll also need a LIFX account; you can register for one via the LIFX mobile app. Signing up requires your email address as well as a fresh password; unfortunately, you can’t register with your Facebook, Apple, or Google account. 

Once the LIFX app is open and ready to go, you tap the “+” sign near the bottom of the screen to add a new device. In my case, the app detected the SuperColor Floor Light immediately and prompted me to scan its Matter QR code. I did so, and within a few minutes, the bulb was successfully paired. 

Next, you can choose where the light will go in your LIFX “home;” for example, you can add the bulb to “living room,” “kitchen,” or another room, where the bulb will be grouped with other LIFX lights in the area.  

If you wish, you can add the SuperColor Floor Light to other smart home apps that work with Matter. I paired the bulb to the Apple Home app, which detected the LIFX bulb and added it to my collection of other HomeKit devices within a minute or so. The light will also work with Alexa, Google Home, or Samsung SmartThings via Matter. 

Features and functionality 

The SuperColor Flood Light benefits from LIFX’s sleek, easy-to-use app, which I described in detail in my LIFX SuperColor Light A21 review.  

In brief, the app offers a tabbed interface (in a nice touch, you can either tap the tabs or swipe through them) that lets you tinker with color and white-color wheels, enable light effects (from “Twinkle” and “Strobe” to “Flicker” and the music-syncing “Visualizer”), trigger themes (such as “Forest,” “Ocean,” “Energizing,” “Fantasy,” and “Peaceful”), and pick and choose from various color swatches.  

You can also create “scenes” that take a snapshot of the current status of the bulb; these scenes can be triggered manually or in an automation, and they include the ability to fade in the scene over a preset period, anywhere from a second to nearly 24 hours. 

Speaking of automations, you can put the SuperColor Flood Light on a daily or weekly schedule, including triggers for specific times as well as at sunrise or sunset.  

New for the LIFX app are “routines,” or multi-step automations that set different colors or brightness settings for a light, light group, or an entire location at different times. You can customize your own four-step routines or choose from a library of presets, including “Sunrise Wakeup,” “Exercise,” “Work Day Focus,” and “Circadian Rhythm,” and your various routines and schedules appear together in a timeline format within the app.  

The one feature that’s missing is a vacation mode that randomizes your LIFX lights to simulate your presence while you’re away. 

It’s worth noting that when using the SuperColor Flood Light with other smart apps, the more advanced LIFX features–including all the light effects and themes–aren’t available. Instead, you only get the most basic settings for color temperatures and brightness, as well as whatever scheduling features are offered in the given app.

Specifications

• Dimensions: 4.92 x 4.92 x 5.2 inches (WxHxD)
• Weight: 9.5 ounces
• Bulb shape: PAR38
• Base: E26
• Brightness: 1,600 lumens
• Weatherization: IP65 (dust-tight and resistant to water jets from any direction)
• Color-capable: Yes
• White temperatures: 1,500-9,000 Kelvin
• Wireless connectivity: Wi-Fi
• Hub requirement: None
• Matter support: Yes

Should you buy the LIFX SuperColor Flood Light? 

Bright, colorful, weatherized, and stuffed with features, the LIFX SuperColor Flood Light makes for a compelling choice for anyone looking to fully illuminate an area with white light or bold splashes of color.

The LIFX ecosystem might still be recovering following the brand’s belated return to the smart home market, and the lack of a vacation mode is a disappointment. But the LIFX SuperColor Flood Light offers plenty of functionality for the price, while its Matter support allows the bulb to work with a wide range of smart home platforms.