LIFX SuperColor Path review: A pop of color for your walkway

The latest piece of LIFX’s ambitious outdoor puzzle is a close companion to its LIFX SuperColor Spot (which we recently reviewed): the LIFX SuperColor Path.

Unlike a spotlight, which is designed to be positionable (usually in order to illuminate taller landscape items like trees or features on your house), a path light illuminates only the surrounding ground, its glow kept low so as to light up flowers, shrubs, driveways, or–yes–a path. 

With no moving parts, path lights are typically quite simple products. Just identify where you want them to reside, then jam the lights into the ground on the included spike, attaching each to your low-voltage wire.

At $100 each, the LIFX SuperColor Path was ultimately overkill for me.

Functionally, LIFX’s path light works exactly the same way, providing the added bonus of having full control over brightness and color via your smartphone. (If you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of low-voltage landscape lighting, please refer to my previous review of the LIFX SuperColor Spot.) 

Design

Like the LIFX SuperColor Spot, the LIFX SuperColor Path is a sizeable device–bigger than it looks in pictures–that you’ll need to plan ahead for.

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

Each 3.3-inch diameter cylinder is nearly 15 inches tall. (A squared-off version that’s roughly the same size is also available.) The lights can be mounted on a metal spike or connected to a permanent base with the included screws.

Again, just like the Spot, a thick cable streams out from the base of the Path and connects to a breakout box, which in turn connects to a vampire tap connector that clips onto your low-voltage wire.

The Path light itself is enormous, but the significant amount of extra cabling makes the setup even more conspicuous. While I was able to hide some of the Spot’s cabling behind the leaves of nearby plants, I didn’t have that luxury with the Path, which I set up on otherwise open ground. If you’re installing the Path on something like a wooden deck, you’ll need to get particularly creative with your solution to this problem. 

Each Path light draws a hefty 32 watts of power and cranks out 800 lumens of light, a significant level that is equivalent to a 60-watt light bulb.

I only had one unit for testing, but a single Path in the corner of my backyard was more than bright enough to read by at night. A yard outfitted with five or six of these lights set to white lighting would likely be so bright as to make you feel like you were indoors. 

Features and functionality

Other than luminosity, the Path has many of the same features as LIFX’s String and Spot lights, with multiple addressable color zones (six here) that let the light display multiple colors simultaneously. If you want white light, the available color temperature range of 1,500 Kelvin to 9,000K lets you set whatever mood you could want, from warm candlelight to daylight hues.

Various effects let both colors and white lights flicker, groove, and bounce, which makes them perfect for everything from entertaining to holidays–and the colors do really pop in a way that few other color bulbs can achieve.

The Path light uses the same app and interface as all of LIFX’s other color lighting products, so if you’re familiar with the ecosystem, there’s no learning curve to climb. 

Setup

Unlike my smooth experiences with the String and Spot, I did encounter a setup problem with the Path–namely, the mobile app couldn’t initially find it at all. I presumed this might be a Wi-Fi range problem, a challenge that those with sprawling grounds will have to deal with, so I set up a range extender just a few feet from the light. Still, the app couldn’t connect to it.

LIFX tech support (based in Australia) directed me to reset the light, which involves power cycling it five times rapidly, which is something I’d missed in the small manual included in the box. That’s tricky on a device with a stab-in connector, so I ended up disconnecting the two pieces of the power cable from each other and reconnecting them, though this was slightly tricky due to the design of the connector. Another option would have been to simply power cycle the transformer five times quickly, but LIFX noted that this would have factory reset all the lights connected to it. 

In any event, after completing this process, I was able to scan the QR code printed on the bottom of the light and connect it successfully to the LIFX app and Apple HomeKit. Support for Alexa, Google Home, and SmartThings (courtesy of Matter) is also available. 

As with the LIFX Spot, the LIFX Path comes with its share of additional caveats to consider. At 32 watts, the unit draws even more power than the LIFX Spot does, so a typical household transformer may become overloaded if you get too aggressive.

And again, control is a problem: Unless you leave your transformer running 24/7, you won’t be able to use the app to turn the lights on and off. But leaving the transformer on seems like a waste of power for something you’ll probably only have running for a few hours a day. 

Specifications

• Dimensions: 3.3 x 3.3 x 14.56 inches (WxDxH)
• Wattage: 33.0W at full brightness
• Brightness: Up to 800 lumens
• Color temperature: 1,500-9,000K
• Wireless: Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only)
• Smart home integrations: Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings
• Matter support: Yes

Should I buy the LIFX SuperColor Path?

Colors look great when projected onto a tree. They’re much less exciting when they’re shining on the ground. So while I liked the pop of color that the LIFX SuperColor Spot added to my otherwise monochrome–and inexpensive and simple–landscape lighting installation, the LIFX SuperColor Path was ultimately overkill for me.

Cost is a final concern. At $100 each, the LIFX SuperColor Path lights are even more expensive than the LIFX SuperColor Spot, and (naturally) you probably won’t want to settle for just one.

If you have a typical pathway with room for six lights…well, you can do the math on that, and even that modest installation may require a larger transformer, too. That’s a huge outlay for decorative lighting.