After Lumens and CCT, here comes CRI

CRI or Colour Rendering Index is a measurement of the vibrancy of an LED light source. The CRI rating of a light source tells you how well the colours of the object it illuminates are rendered. Don’t confuse this with the value of CCT I mentioned in my previous article in this series. Imagine a Christmas morning when you get your new dress you bought after much choosing and wear it. The glass bulb in your house makes the new dress look dull. You wonder what happened. This same dress looked awesome at the store when I tried it, but looks dull inside your house. You decide to walk out the door and look at your dress in natural sunlight. The dress looks so beautiful once again.

This is because the glass bulb you have indoors is rendering the colours in a dull quality, whereas sunlight or the store light made it look really vibrant. On a scale of 1 to 100, if natural sunlight is at 100 on the CRI scale, glass bulbs render the colours at may be 50 CRI. A fluorescent tube light might do a better job and render it at 70 to 80 CRI. LED’s can be sorted out based on quality and binned as CRI 90 or CRI 80 or even lesser. Normally LED’s render colours much better than incandescent lights bulbs. Manufacturers choose coating materials that can give them a CRI 90 or CRI 80 output so there chips can be sold at a premium. The higher the CRI better the quality of the light. Today almost any mall, supermarket, jeweler store or clothing store prefer LED lighting only because a good quality LED lighting can make the products stand out.

Next time you look for LED lighting to buy check what the CRI of the light is. The closer it is to 99 the higher the quality is. Remember CCT indicates the colour of the light itself. CRI indicates the quality of the light.

I hope you liked to know this information about LED lights. If you want to know about anything else in particular let me know. Otherwise I am going to tell you about the control systems used for LED lighting.