For the most part, I really like the Philips Wake-up Light. The modern design is great. The lighting itself is beautiful. The product features are adequate. The orange LED display offers four levels of brightness. The control buttons blend in nicely with the trim. The snooze button, appropriately, sticks out like a sore thumb so if I'm still drowsy I can just reach over and activate it without lifting my head all the way up off the pillow to find it.
The elegant halogen illumination is the heart of what this product is all about. You can use the Wake-up Light as a bedside lamp and adjust it to any of several intensities. Powering down, it smoothly transitions to darkness. Awesome!
The radio sounds nice, comparable to your standard clock radio. Unfortunately, it's FM only, and I'm one who likes to make the most out of my space. With no AM band to choose from it loses a bit of value for me.
As a wake-up light, this product is fantastic! With the unit placed within a couple feet of your head, it does a fine job at convincing you that the sun has risen. There are three choices of alarms: FM radio, chirping birds or a "beep" as it is referred to in the manual, but it really sounds more like a lazy kettledrum concerto. I love waking up to the chirping birds...very natural.
If you're typically miserable when being abruptly awakened to dark surroundings, then I highly recommend this item. It's a luxurious waking experience, which can contribute to a more positive start to your mornings. It really is a cool thing to have.
***6 Month Update*** Had a lot of questions about burning out lights and whether or not I still enjoyed the alarm clock, so I just thought that I'd offer a quick update to my review. At nearly 6 months, I still use the alarm clock every day and have yet to be dissatisfied and my original review still stands. The light bulb has so far not burnt out and that's even with me using it for hours at a time as a reading lamp (note that the bulb is replaceable should it ever burn out). The bird noises still sound natural and pleasing to me (I was afraid I'd eventually associate bird tweets with groggy mornings and want to kill anything with feathers) and, in fact, I still occasionally wake up and think: My goodness, some bird is going to town out there... before realizing it's only my alarm clock. As always, if there are any further questions, please leave them in the comments section and I'll do my best to answer them.
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With the exception of the somewhat alarming price tag, this alarm clock alternative is actually really wonderful! I've been using it for a while now and find it every bit as effective at getting me up in the morning as my old BEEP!!!!!! BEEEP !!!!!!!! BEPPPP! alarm clock, without the mini heart attack I used to have every morning. Annnnd, in addition to the pleasant factor, it's also very handy. I've found myself turning on the lamp constantly in the middle of the night should I need to get up. The FM radio is really impressive, too. The device has great reception (comes with a wire antennae) and has surprisingly good audio quality. The video doesn't do it justice exactly, but there's actually some pretty good bass.
Here's a rundown of what I love about the Philips wake up light:
Pleasant way to wake up
Easy to use controls
Lamp multi-purposeful
Excellent quality radio
The only cons I can see are the price a little hefty for an alarm clock, but you know if it's worth it. And the fact that it's a fairly big device and won't travel with you easily. It may not sit on your nightstand well, either, depending on how much room you have BUT since it doubles as a lamp and radio you can actually replace those things with this one compact contraption!
Overall, I'm in love! I'm not at all a morning person so anything that can start my day better is worth its weight in gold.
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I HATE getting up in the morning, and this thing has made it a little less painful, especially as we move into the winter months when it's still dark when I get up. I've always been able to wake easier when the sun is up, and that's the philosophy behind this wake up light.
Set a wakeup time, and the light will gradually start brightening to the setting you've picked over a span of about 20 minutes. You can choose the light brightness you wake up to brightness goes from 1 (very low) to 20 (ridiculously blindingly high). Mine is set at about 7, though it could be a couple notches lower (maybe when it's not dark out when you need to get up, you need a higher setting). This gently and effectively wakes me up. I usually wake up before the brightest part (which is why I need to adjust it), but can easily go back to sleep for a bit as it brightens up and then wake up with the final brightness at the alarm sound, and I feel much less horrid than I usually do when I get up to a radio alarm.
If you need it (you don't HAVE to have it on), you can also add a sound. The sound only comes on at the alarm time (say, if you set your alarm for 7, the light will start at around 6:40, but the alarm sound won't come on until 7), but gradually gets louder. You can wake to FM radio, chirping birds, or (what I picked) the "lazy kettle drum band" as another reviewer described it. All very nice and not jarring.
I really like this alarm. It wakes my hubby up as well on days that I'm working and he's not, but the regular alarm woke him up, too, and this is less jarring to both of us. I much prefer it to the sudden jolt of the alarm, or even a gradual sound alarm alone. I used to find myself waiting and bracing myself for the sound of the alarm if I half-woke-up not too long before it, but now I can actually go back to sleep and not feel like I have to prepare myself for it. When you hit SNOOZE, the alarm sound goes off, but not the light (I'm honestly not sure what happens if you snooze and you don't have an alarm sound set, though!).
It loses one star because for the price, the alarm could be more fully featured. It's missing some simple features: dual alarm, weekday/weekend settings, auto reset (though you can train yourself to do this manually by flicking the alarm switch back down every AM after you turn it off), digital FM tuner, and memory for the light level so that the alarm can be at say 7, but the light alone at 15.
You can also use the lamp alone or the radio alone, so I was able to condense 2 things on my bedside table (alarm clock and light) into one, and this one is fairly attractive (some of these light alarm things are pretty ugly).
Extra note: the LCD setting also has 4 brightness settings, which is nice. I can't stand a super-bright LCD, and the lowest one is fine for me.
Hope that helps. I really like this thing. Though it's WAAAAY more than I would normally pay for an alarm clock, it's made my mornings so much nicer that I'd definitely buy another one if I needed to.
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The short version of this review is as follows: You could accomplish the same thing with a cheap electrical outlet timer with a lamp plugged in and keep your existing alarm clock and save a whole lot of money, but it is a decent alarm clock.
My motivation for purchasing this item, which I have been using for a month now, was because we are currently in winter and my normal waking hour in the morning is before sunrise currently. This means the room is pitch black and it is awfully hard to get up when it's both cold and dark in the bedroom and the bed is nice and warm. As always, I was finding myself having a hard time "getting it in gear" in the mornings because of this, and I generally do better during the summer months when sunrise is around the same time or earlier as when my alarm goes off. For about 4-5 months of the year, though, it's just tough. I had been thinking how nice it might be to have an artificial sunrise of sorts to help me get up and at 'em. Then I stumbled across this idea and just KNEW that someone else was thinking the same thing. I eagerly anticipated this alarm arriving and set it up the very first day I received it. I thought it would be perfect because I was going into a week of call and knew it was going to get progressively harder to get up for 2 weeks (no weekends) due to working straight through.
After the first week, I was sort of disappointed, but I thought that perhaps it was simply a matter of getting back on a non-call schedule rotation that was needed. So I have given it another 4 weeks and am still rather ho-hum about it.
Function:
This is basically a simple alarm clock with radio, buzzer, and birds chirping options for wake up sound. It has a pleasant, amber, reasonably large time display on the front and is capped by a conical lamp shade with what seems to be an incandescent light inside. This lamp has 20 stages of brightness and a separate on-off switch from the radio on-off and bracketing the switch are the brighter/dimmer buttons which mirror the volume up/down buttons beside the radio button. You can set the lamp to any of the 20 levels of brightness and turn the lamp off. At this point the alarm remembers what the brightness setting was last set to as the target brightness for the next time the alarm goes off. The same applies to the volume settings on the audible portion of the alarm.
Once the brightness is set, and the alarm is set, the alarm will turn on the lamp at the lowest setting 30 minutes before the set time for the audible alarm to go off. It will then progressively increase the lamp brightness over that 30 minutes to the pre-determined brightness, at which point the audible portion of the alarm will sound (in my case, the radio turns on) with a nice, gentle, ramp-up to the volume. You can, alternately, set the volume to be off, as mentioned above, and only have the lamp turn on with no sound associated with it.
The trick to figuring out what brightness setting you need is to set it to full bright (#20) the first time and then, when you wake up the next morning, take note of how bright the lamp was when you "registered" that it was on and awoke. Set it to that number for the next night and you should then time it roughly so that you wake up when the audible alarm goes off.
Pros:
Volume ramp-up on the radio is very gentle. Much slower than most alarms but still hits target volume in 30 sec or so. This is how it should be done.
Display is easily readable at night but not overly bright/room illuminating. I like my room to be dark, and the amber light is minimal enough to not disturb.
Can double as a night stand lamp, helping you reduce some of the clutter over there.
Light is sufficiently bright to get your attention when asleep if you happen to be turned that direction. It also helps me get to the other side of the room to the overhead light switch.
Cons:
Light output is not very bright. At full illumination, it's not really bright enough to comfortably light up my 20'x20' bedroom. It seems equivalent to perhaps a 30W light bulb or so. If you are not facing the lamp at least somewhat, you may not notice the light being on. It basically means I have to leave it set to max brightness for the alarm because half the time my back is to it and it's effectively, then, just a simple radio alarm.
Light is extremely yellow. Much more yellow than most incandescent bulbs and not at all like a real sunrise light color temperature.
Uses a proprietary lamp module, apparently, that has to be ordered from Philips. I have no idea how long to expect the included bulb to last, but it will eventually need replacing, and who knows if you'll be able to purchase one at that point. After all, they just outlawed incandescent bulbs, effectively.
The unit is huge. It takes up about as much space as a table lamp with shade does, though doesn't put out as much light as one. It's mostly vertical volume, so that helps some, but it towers over most other alarms.
The radio is poor. Reception for even nearby, strong stations waxes and wanes and is even severely affected by my position in my bed.
Sound quality is limited. This is your tinny little radio sound with no depth or volume. I can't tolerate listening to music on this unit, though talk radio (NPR) is acceptable. Thankfully this isn't that much worse than your average alarm radio, so most folks won't be taking a downgrade here.
Only a single alarm setting. No dual/multiple alarms for those who have varying daily schedules (e.g., college students) or for those who prefer a weekend setting and a weekday setting (myself).
All controls are on the front or side, none on top. This makes them all difficult to reach/use, especially when half-asleep.
You don't really feel any more rested when you wake up with the light on. It just makes it easier to turn on a real light in the room.
Very expensive for what you get. You could replicate most of this system simply by keeping your existing alarm and table lamp and adding a timer to the outlet the lamp is plugged in to in order to go off at the pre-desired time, a minute or two before the alarm does. That'd cost you about $5.
If it were me, I would do several things to improve the device.
1. Change the light source to something with a more white light and brighter light. an LED system would solve this, probably by having a preset number of LEDs, each one lighting up progressively. This would, if done properly, light up the whole room AND provide a much more natural light closer to the real world sunrise I was hoping for. I know they have LED based light therapy lamps at Philips, perhaps they could borrow those? Or, at least, let me plug in a higher wattage incandescent lamp with a whiter light output.
2. Shrink the unit by about 50-70%. Again, switching to LEDs would probably help this.
3. Provide at least dual-alarm capability.
4. Improve radio sound quality. With as large an enclosure as this thing has, it ought to sound much better than it does, even allowing for the lamp portion.
5. Drop the cost. This is a $20 alarm, basically. If they could make the above changes, it would be about a $50 alarm clock.
This is not a bad alarm, or a bad lamp. It's just not worth what the asking price is and it's certainly not much better than a standard alarm clock.
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I've had this Wake-up light for about a week now, and I am very satisfied. I get up very early and always have a hard time getting going. This light greatly helps ease the transition into wakefulness.
While using this wake-up light, I often gently wake up just a few minutes prior to the audio alarm sounds start, which gives me the luxury of lying in bed for a few more minutes as I think about the upcoming day before I need to get out of bed. I really enjoy the bird-chirping alarm sound as well as the beeping which actually sounds more like a steel drum. I haven't used the radio, so I cannot speak to its quality.
Additionally, I feel much better when waking up to a lighted room. I know longer have to fight the urge to hit the snooze button over and over again.
Final note: I decided on this model after reading the reviews of a similar model (the Philips Hf3480). The reviews of it were initially very good, but a disturbing number of reviewers had come back to edit their reviews. Apparently the light bulbs were burning out quickly and could not be replaced. On this model, light bulb is replaceable, so if it burns out quickly, it will not be too much of an inconvenience.
Edit (on April 11, 2011): After about 6 months of use, the light bulb is still going strong, and I still love waking up to the light.
Edit again (on December 20, 2011): The original light bulb is still going strong. I'm still extremely satisfied.
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I haven't used the aromatherapy packet that came with the sleep mask, but this works very well for my purposes. It's very comfortable to wear, and while it doesn't block 100% of all light (some peeks in around my nose), it blocks substantial amounts of light. With my eyes closed, I can't tell that light leaks in, and I don't know many people who try to sleep with their eyes open. In fact, I've been able to sleep undisturbed, straight through strong morning light in a curtainless room full of windows. Before using this mask, a tiny bit of morning light escaping between the slats of venetian blinds would wake me up, and I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. This was well worth the money to me. I like the pink fabric, but the textured part of it is totally unnecessary. It doesn't affect it's effectiveness, though.
