The selling point in TV backlighting is energy conservation, not lumen output. Fluorescent backlighting in television sets is rapidly becoming a thing of the past due to it’s greater long term cost of use as well as poor control of light distribution. Thermal control is also a substantial issue between the two forms of backlighting.
Lambasting a room with lumens is actually one of the issues, in many cases the “room” doesn’t need all the light, just the sitting area’s where books, tv guides and such are read. I’ve seen a great many houses built with no overhead lighting, room light wasnt an issue.
And no, it wasn’t my intention to compare “cheap” fluorescents to photographic lighting. Remember also that there’s no such thing as a .25 cfl, the tax base subsidizing pays the balance and the tax base is YOU! So the higher price IS being paid, it’s just hidden to appeal to the sense of economical purchasing power. Not to mention the problem we’re getting ourselves into buying all the cheap stuff from China. The point I was trying to make with photography (albeit I failed) was that going into peoples homes where the cheapest cfl available is their lighting source, it’s dang near impossible to give them quality photo’s even when using high dollar photographic lighting, as the cfl’s put a nasty mix into the equation that even photoshop has issues dealing with. People are not as healthy, with eye strain, headaches, moodiness, and depression from (studies indicate) poor lighting. Yes, there are fluorescents out there that don’t fall into this category, but they have to be found, and they’re not the cheap ones. One has to research to find out about them and then find them. And let’s face it, the percentage of people willing to spend their time researching something that’s not fun is very low.
You asked about CRI in flash strobes. The real deal with CRI is having a standard to compare to. Any color light can be held to a standard to achieve a high CRI, hence my example of a lowly single candle having 100CRI ratings. The camera, or should I say good cameras, use the standard base settings from the known output of the strobe and adjust color settings accordingly. Get the settings wrong and the colors are horrendous! Drop the flash output and the settings change accordingly, if you’re using automatic settings….in manual color temperature modes you’d better know what you’re doing when you change the flash output or the results won’t be pretty.
Point being, if the U.S. government is going to mandate that we buy CFL why aren’t measure’s taken to ensure that US companies are producing said product to employ US citizens in producing quality healthy economical lighting? Isn’t social sustainability, natural resource sustainability, what green is all about?