Color Rendering Index and LED Lights

In accordance to the survey, the most popular measurement of the color characteristics of the light source on on naked eye is the color rendering index (CRI), which indicates the light source that displays the color of the object with the reality “or” naturally, as compared to incandescent or familiar reference light sources in the day.

By definition, we regard the noon sun’s CRI as 100, means that all color a noon sun (5500Kelvin) can display, is 100. This is the clear judgement for the quality of a light and its color to display. That is why when we have a display of CRI 105, we are very cheered as it can display more color than the nature sun, means there are colors we cannot normally seen displayed.

By theory, the CRI is measured by the chromaticity difference of color samples of 8 CIE standard when illuminated by the light source and the same correlated color temperature reference light source. CRI is 100 for maximum value. A lower CRI value indicates that some of the colors look unnatural when the lamp is illuminated. Incandescent CRI greater than 95. The CRI of the cold white fluorescent lamp is 60, but a fluorescent lamp including a rare earth phosphor having a CRI value of 80 or more may be used.

For LED, it can basically made into CRI 75-98, as the spectrum of LED is much full and contains much more details, according to some survey, when we have a LED CRI 90 bulb, it is much better color performance than incandescent bulb already. Plus much higher the efficiency (5-10times), and much strong in power (There are maximum 10,000 Watt led light in market), LED can present much better effect than ever. There starts to have many film maker using LED as the sole light source for commercial filming.

In Plain words, CRI decide how many colors and how depth of the colors we can see from our eyes.

Recently there is also a new Index we call it TLCI, it is an index similiar to CRI, but define the light quality from Camera point of view, we shall introduce you the details in the following articles.

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