I’m happy to be writing again for Architectural Lighting Magazine, for which I served as editor and publisher in the late 1990s. Editor Elizabeth Donoff is doing a terrific job providing the industry with great editorial, and brought me back to contribute a technology column in each issue.
My contribution to the Jan/Feb issue deals with the primary color rendering metric, CRI. Originally developed more than 40 years ago to address fluorescent lamp technology, CRI has proved a durable, if somewhat limited, metric for evaluating color-rendering ability. The advent of solid-state lighting, however, has highlighted the shortcomings of CRI, and created demand for a new way to measure color rendering that not only addresses conventional sources, but accurately depicts SSL product performance.
This article explores the shortcomings of CRI in relation to solid-state lighting and presents two metrics under consideration as possible replacements–Color Quality Scale, championed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Gamut Area index, championed by the Lighting Research Center.
Check it out here.
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