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I don’t agree with the common BLF dogma that says high CRI makes things easier to perceive or recognize. For decades, people watched movies on low resolution televisions with literally no colors and they were able to recognize everything on the screen. With flashlights, I have literally never found myself actually unable to recognize or taking even a millisecond longer to recognize any single object in the world because the flashlight used to illuminate it was “low CRI.” OK, so reds are a little dimmer in low CRI light, it’s just something you get used to. The color of sunlight changes throughout the day and is different still when it’s cloudy, and humans have evolved to continue to recognize items in the world even with these slight changes, so it’s not clear to me how messing with the colors to such a small degree is supposed to affect cognition.

That said, high CRI LEDs are absolutely better than low CRI LEDs. On knife forums, enthusiasts talk a lot about their high carbon steels or ultra hard stainless steels. Well, high CRI is kind of like that. It tends to be a desirable feature because, even though the difference doesn’t have a huge amount of practical repercussions over something more basic (or rather, there are benefits, but they tend to be diminishing returns), it’s still more pleasant to use high CRI flashlights. The color of light tends to affect our mood, and the technical accomplishment of formulating an LED that approximates sunlight so well is cool in itself. There are certain practical advantages, like in medical use, although not everyone will really care about the actual advantages like that. Mostly, it’s just that a good high CRI emitter tends to produce light that “looks better”than an inferior product.

The same goes for brightness. Even though a 300 lumen flashlight is about as bright as the average handheld user will ever practically need, we still want the ability to shine 3000 lumens, 30,000 lumens or, someday, 300,000 lumens, if only because it’s a technical accomplishment and it’s cool. It doesn’t matter that the human eye doesn’t perceive light linearly, it’s still something that enthusiasts want because it’s “bigger and better” than what was available last year.