Sure CRI is a real measurable property, but that’s not the point. In my experience high CRI makes VERY little difference in how pleasing or effective the light output is. As such, I consider the benefits of high CRI to be very overblown.
The characterization of the tint being neutral or cool is immediately obvious and is much more significant to me than CRI.
- I hate cool-white tints and do my best to steer clear of them. I always buy neutral if its an option, and if not I tend to always mod my lights to neutral. The only lights I have that I occasionally use that are still cool white are my shaved-dome SST40 lights… and then only because there’s no alternative.
- I dislike greenish tints and prefer tints below the BBL. However, I may still use them if the light has other benefits. Example: my Zebralight SC600w IV Plus. Fantastic light with tremendous output. More useful than a D4 due to current regulation and better temp management. Run both lights for a minute on turbo and the Zebralight will be much brighter than the D4. The D4 only pulls ahead when run for 30 seconds or less.
- Most of the time, I can’t see the difference in CRI at all unless I compare the beams of a high-CRI light side-by-side with a lower-CRI light of similar tint. Essentially, high-CRI seems to offer virtually no noticeable benefit. Unless using a light for a task where color rendering must be as accurate as possible (such as photography) I’d steer clear of high-CRI.
- Much more noticeable to me is that the high-CRI LEDs tend to have very significant tradeoffs: enormously lower output for the nichias, greenish tint for the Zebralight SC64c (so I hear… don’t own one myself), or overly warm tint for some of the older CREES (have some 90-CRI 3000K XML2s laying around…. too warm for me).
I won’t turn down high-CRI if a light has it. But I don’t go out of my way to select for high-CRI either. My newest light received today is actually high CRI (Zebralight headlamp H604C 4000K 90CRI, 1616 lumens). I selected this model over the higher lumen neutral white model not because it was high-CRI, but because it was 4000K, which I prefer for headlamp use. Here’s hoping this zebra is below the BBL.