What is really the High CRI feature?

Warmer tints don't necessarily have higher CRI. The orange tinted sodium-pressure street lights are very warm yet have almost 0 on the CRI index. Sunlight at midday on a cloudy day is often above 6500k but 100CRI.

LEDs tend to be warmer if they are high CRI as they naturally emit monochromatic blue light and this is corrected with phosphor over the base die. To be more efficient this usually takes the form of peaks at different parts of the colour spectrum, but this does not give high CRI. Higher CRI generally means a better, more even spread of light on the spectral distribution. As LEDs naturally make enough lower wavelength blue light this means they need to make up much more in the medium (green) and longer (red) wavelengths. This is why with LEDs higher CRI normally takes the form of a low CCT output on the whole.

If you want to take it a little further you can still be very skeptical of CRI as a measurement of colour at all. It is not as far as I know directly derived from spectral distributions but simply measured subjectively by people who judge the light according to a black-body at the same temperature as the CCT level of whatever light source it is. This is also why incandescent lights necessarily have 100 CRI as they are a black-body themselves so they will be the same as what they are being judged against.

More recent psychophysical studies have been suggesting alternate and supposedly better measurements of colour accuracy of light sources with naturally peaked spectral distributions such as a 'Colour Harmony Rendering Index' which supposedly give a better fit to perceived colour accuracy. However, for the moment CRI is still the industry standard so that is what is used.

Still, while it is somewhat correlated with CCT it is strictly independent of it.

CRI has been around for a long time as a way to measure how well a light renders all visible colors, but I think Cree has started using it recently as another way to market and bin their LED's. 4Sevens picked up on it with their line of High CRI limited editions, but I don't know that Cree is changing the way they are making the LED's (edit: okay, maybe they are, but I'm still a little skeptical). It's almost a direct correlation between other ways of describing the lights, like 75 is neutral and 85 is warm. At least for LED's.

It's mostly the pastel colors that are tested on LED emitters (color 1-8, see wiki link above) not the full color range, that's why it is so controversial to use the pseudo CR index. I would expect a heavy CRI drop if the full color range was used, this might be the reason why there is some resistance to go that way. Nobody wants to give the impression that their emitter get "worse".

Some Nichias reach 95-98 CRI.

Color Curve XR-E

Source in German ( and the crude fish of babel translation) how the pseudo CRI is applied nowadays.

So there is a chance at least in cree labs for some happy circumstances turned to some genuine BS eventually. They don't specifically make them High CRI they just came out that way. :)

Anyway, this one turned out a great and informative thread.

I suggest to sticky this thread somewhere as the info is getting really good.

Gotta love the veriety of users and knowledge that can be had on BLF! :) (from led info to electronics, chemistry, metallurgy even cooking flashlights lately...)

I really love BLF.

The CRI also has meaning only as it relates to the color temperature of the light.
A light with a high CRI and a color temp of 3000 K may represent colors more accurately than a light with a low CRI and a color temp of 3000 K but it won’t be more accurate than a light with an average CRI and a color temp of 5500K.
The 3000K is still going to appear yellow compared to the 5500K light. High CRI and a color temp around 5500 will appear more like the light of the sun which we would judge to be “natural”.

The thing is that the CCT of sunlight changes massively during the day from 6500k+ at noon on a cloudy day to even below 2000k at sunset. Our eyes easily adapt to the CCT of most light sources if there aren't other bright light sources around to bias it. However, it is much harder, basically impossible in fact, for our eyes to adjust to/compensate for lower CRI.

Cree certainly did not 'make high CRI LEDs by accident', it was a deliberate decision and involved quite a lot of thought, research and effort to accurately make high CRI LEDs. They rate their other LEDs from previously according to CRI as well and I don't think they ever went above 80 even with warm or neutral tints. High CRI are specifically engineered to give a broader colour spectrum with the trade-off of efficiency, made to compete with Nichia and SSC's previous offerings.

I had found a list of high CRI emitters and the only ones I own are the 3D XPGs I got from Shiningbeam, they do appear to show colors better than my other tint XPGs.

Those 3D XP-Gs from shiningbeam are a very good tint, but I don't think high CRI, I believe they are around 75 CRI still? Cree does not yet make truly High CRI XP-Gs 85 or 90+ (or any other LED) above 3700k right now as far as I'm aware.

Some McGizmos had High CRI emitters with quite High CCT valua also, I think they were Nichias of some sort.

CCT was probably above 4000K-5000K?

High CRI is interesting - Low Kelvin value added to it, not really :|

But doesn't it all pertain to LEDs used in housing and work environments, where people will be using/exposed to it on a daily basis for hours on end? I mean it's not really all that pertinent to flashlights, usless you happen to be using one for several non-stop hours a day. No?

I can see the need for the above mentioned purposes, but for flashlights CRI seems to be a mute point. Could a flashlight user really be able to tell 70CRI from 80CRI (at the same color temp) while bike riding or walking in the woods, or would they have to shine it on a color test panel to really know anything?

Just me wandering through again...

On that note can someone take a photo of beamshots of a high CRI flashlight and a neutral xm-l light place side by side or any regular neutral light you have.

As an analogy, is the perceived difference similar to an mp3 file 256 vs 384, 128 vs 256, or 64 vs 128 kbps?

why don't they offer high cri, or tint options in budget class lights?

I can't comment on the science and manufacturing techniques behind HCRI, but I can say that the tints they usually come in just don't do it for me.

For example, the 30000k XP-G HCRI emitter in the FourSevens HCRI lights is extremely red/rosy, and completely exaggerates those colors as a result.

For me, I've found that neutrals somewhere around 4500k (and maybe a tiny bit lower) is my sweet spot.

See it for yourself: http://thebrightsideforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1317

Terralux LightStar80

might be the one of the cheapest ways to get a High CRI light, with decent output

I wonder what the color temperature is. And it's probably using an XP-E...?

Good question and I am still on the fence about trying one out. There are some very mixed experiences out there (and here ) ... if you get a nice one it seems to do the job. If there would be a German seller where I could send it back in case I receive a lemon, then I would have already ordered one.

I find the cool white high CRI option on Nichias especially interesting, that is certainly a feature one doesn't get from CREE. The whole reason I buy neutral/warm tints is to get slightly better CRI... but if I could 95-98 get CRI 7000K XP-G/XM-L ... I wouldn't own a single neutral/warm white light.

You would know the difference. An incan is 100 CRI. If you walked through the woods with an incan driven well so that it was closer to white than to yellow and then did the same walk with a white LED you could tell the difference for sure.
There also is no real distinction between using a flashlight for some period of time and being exposed to indoor lighting for hours on end.
You may not notice that there is anything “wrong” with your lower CRI lights unless you compared them to a high CRI at the same time as our eyes adapt/adjust pretty well.
However, I haven’t been interested in any of the higher CRI lights that are only available in the lower color temps as I prefer a neutral or white light.

Any sources for those High CRI Nichia LEDs?

Is that thing really high CRI? 70 RA doesn't seem so high to me.... also the experiences aren't too promising as far as efficiency is concerned. (scroll to the end)

The warm white has 80 RA .