What does CRI mean for LED strips?
This is a way to measure how well a light source shows colours. CRI stands for Colour Rendering Index. When the look of things is important, like in shopping, under-cabinet lighting, photography, and high-end building lighting, CRI is a good way to measure LED strips.
Why is the CRI of an LED strip important in some tasks?
Have you ever had trouble telling the difference between shades or hues and had to move closer to a window to see better?
When things look the same in artificial light as they would in natural light, the light source is true. You would be able to see small changes in colours just as well with a good light source as you would in natural sun.
You wouldn't have to go to the window to tell the difference between those colours in our case above if you had an accurate LED strip with a high CRI.
Depending on what the LED strip lights are used for, how people see colours may be very important. For instance, high CRI LED strips would be great for under-cabinet lighting because they would help you correctly tell the colour of different food items, like how ripe a tomato is. When choosing the colour of paints or fabrics in an industrial setting, colour uniformity may be very important.
What level of CRI is good for LED strips?
As we've already talked about, CRI is a useful way to figure out how accurate a light source is. In real life, though, small mistakes in how colours look won't be noticed and might even be fine for some uses.
Most of the time, LED strips used in retail, restaurants, and high-end building lighting should have a CRI of 90 or higher. For work-related tasks like shooting, you might want 95 CRI or better. One reason for this is that the light source has to be very close to natural sunshine because of the higher CCT used in these situations.
85 CRI is a good number for most other uses, especially when cost and speed are important. Anyone with a CRI below 85 will be able to tell because the light will be dull and soft throughout the whole placement.
When shopping for LED strips, don't just look at the CRI value
If we look more closely at how CRI is calculated and what it means, the first thing you will notice is that it is based on the average of either 8 or 14 different colour sample numbers. This is because CRI (Ra) and CRI Extended are different.
The number for each colour example shows how well that colour can be shown by the light source. Let's take a closer look at each of these colour samples to find out which colours the LED strip does a good job of showing and which colours it does a bad job of showing.
According to the CRI formula, there is a colour called R9 that tells us a lot about how well deep, rich reds are shown. This is very important for creating skin tones.
