DenverElectronics CRL-310 wake up light sunrise alarm clock with nature sounds & mood light

I love this lamp. I'm notoriously bad tempered when it comes to those dark mornings, and this lamp has brought about a nice change for me so far. I've only been using it for a week, but it already seems to me to be functional, reliable, and useful.It's a little fiddly to get started with, making sure you're pressing the right buttons and so forth, but the ever so handy remote means that once you've worked it out, it's easy to work with. I'll admit that I don't use the radio function at all, but as I was setting it up, it seemed to pick up the stations just fine.The light itself can be used as a colourful mood light, or as a bedside lamp with a choice of 10 brightness settings. The light has the curious quality of being quite bright to look at, but not very luminous in a room - perfect for a bedside lamp in my opinion. However, I am not sure that this would be suitable for everyone as the time seems to always be on display. This doesn't bother me in the slightest, but others may not be able to cope with this.The alarm has two presets that can be easily identified on the time display. These presets have quite a long set up, meaning quite a bit of button pressing, but they're so useful that I don't mind one bit. First, set the time. Next, say when you want the alarm to go off (Mon-Fri? Mon-Sun? One day only and which day?). Then pick the sound for the alarm. I use Natural Sound 2, which is sort of a birds chirping that annoys me out of bed to turn it off, but you could have the radio. Pick your volume level, then pick your light level. Sorted. The light turns on at level 1 and moves through the levels of light for half an hour before the alarm sounds. Because the light does not illuminate my bedroom fully, I find this very useful, as I am woken up gently and indeed feel able to go back to dozing if I need to.The lamp is pretty to look at, not in the way, and allows me to be woken up gently. No more bad tempered coffee throwing for me!

It's good value for money and has a lot of features, but it could be better.I bought this to replace a 15 year old Outside-In sunrise clock that was giving up. That was very simple but it had 2 features I liked that this doesn't. It started off very dim and yellowish and rose very slowly to maximum brightness, while this clock starts with quite bright white light and brightens in sudden, jerky steps. The sudden switch-on usually wakes me immediately... 30 minutes before the alarm time. The whole point of sunrise clocks is not to do the sudden wake-up thing. The Outside-In clock used to wake me naturally just a few minutes before the alarm went off.The second thing is the lack of a sunset function. There's a multi-coloured mood light which changes colour too fast to be relaxing (for me, at least), but no simulation of sunset to ease you to sleep. You can freeze the frenetic mood lamp at a nice fixed colour if you want. I've set mine to a reddish-yellow sunset-like colour that's quite relaxing.There are 3 nature sounds. The rain sound sounds like rain - check. Birds tweeting is the best, and despite being on a very short loop, is relaxing. I wasn't expecting to use this when I bought it, but I often do. I'm not sure what the third one is. It sounds like a blocked drain. Sometimes when I wake up to this I've got Dyno-Rod booked to sort the drains out before I'm compos mentis enough to work out which jar the coffee is in.There's an FM radio, which works OK. There are 2 alarms, and each can be programmed for every day, weekdays only, weekends only or a specific day only. It's possible to switch the time display off, which helps stop you clock-watching if you suffer from insomnia. This was an important feature for me, and one of the main reasons I chose this particular clock. If you do have the display off, pressing any button turns it back on for 15 seconds, so can still tell the time.It can tell you the temperature. It can tell you the date, but (and I think this is weird) when you press the date button it tells you what year it is. If you press it twice, it tells you what month and day it is. I reckon most people would rather know the day, and only resort to trying to find out what year it is after a really big night out.The light has 10 brightness levels. The lowest one is just about good to read by, and the brightest one is on a par with a typical bedside lamp, so that's useful. Unfortunately, the same 10 brightness levels are used for the sunrise alarm. They're too bright and not smoothly-spaced enough.While it is a bit plasticky and dangly-wired, it looks surprising good in use. The remote control seemed like a bit of a gimmick before I bought it, but it's actually a good way to control all the features without covering the clock with buttons. (There are actually a bazillion buttons on the back of the clock as an alternative, but the remote is much easier to use).Overall, it's good but a little bit of tweaking would have made it better. The excessive starting brightness of the wake-up light makes it difficult to use as a sunrise alarm clock.

This doesn't work as expected: the light does not come on gradually, the starting point is probably equivalent to a 20-watt bulb, which is very bright if you are asleep in a dark room with this on your bedside locker. It's like a flashlight in your face. There are sudden increases in brightness every few minutes until the alarm time when the sound comes on. There are three choices of alarm sound, a buzzer, a radio station or "nature sounds". The quality of the speaker is so awful that all of these are unusable, but they cannot be excluded completely - even with the volume set to the minimum, it is awful.The remote control is essential, as the controls on the rear are difficult to use.We've set it up well away from the bed on a dressing table so the instant light doesn't immediately wake us, but the room brightens over 30 minutes. But we remain asleep until the awful noises come on so it doesn't really do what it's supposed to. We are thinking of looking for a refund if we see no benefit after 3 weeks.It's also rather ugly.