What is CRI - Colour Rendering Index
CRI stands for Colour rendering Index, it is a measurement of the quality of light from a downlight or any light source.
The best way to explain it is take a bowl of fruit out into the sunlight, the colours represented in the fruit are as good as it will ever get, the bananas will be bright yellow, the apples will be a vibrant red, the watermelow would be green etc. We give sunlight a CRI of 100, it can't get better than the natural light.
Light sources are given a CRI based on how well they represent the quality of light compared to sunlight. (a rating between 0 and 100)
Compact Flourescent lighting was very popular for a few years before LED lighting came about, compact flourescent lights (CFL's) are a good place to start because they had a terrible CRI, typically they had a CRI of about 65, this was very poor. If you took the same bowl of fruit and placed it under the CFL light source the red will have lost it's vibrancy, the green watermelon would be flat and the yellow dull.
The average LED downlight has a CRI of about 80, not to bad and we get by with this quality of light alot of the time. A good quality LED will have a CRI of above 90 and this is where a quality light really starts to be noticed.
Incandescent and Halogen lighting also had a very good CRI but we are moving away from these types of light to more efficient lighting so it is important that the replacements offer a good CRI.
Brightgreen - special note.
Brightgreen offer a range of products that offer TRU Colour CRI, They spend a lot of time buying good quality LED chips to have the very best CRI to offer. If you spend a lot of money on a timber floor in your home you want it to look as good at night as during the day so don't then buy the cheapest downlights you can find.
TRU Colour is a name brightgreen came up with to describe their CRI. , Normal CRI ratings are just an average of the colour spectrum, meaning a downlight could have a very good CRI but still not respresent the Red spectrum very well, they might be really good with the Blue and green spectrum which lifts their overall CRI but poor in the red spectrum. Brightgreen work hard to make sure they represent all the colours of the spectrum at an equally high level setting them apart from many suppliers of downlights and LED products in the market.