WHAT IS CRI?

Let’s discuss daylight for a moment. Light and how it affects us as human beings. To start with, it simply allows us to see and perceive things.  Furthermore, light strongly affects our mood, ability to concentrate, metabolism and even the way we sleep at night. In 2020, light-sensitive photoreceptors were discovered in the retina, clarifying the impact of daylight on humans even further.The lack of daylight in particular affects our daily lives more than we may realise… Using ‘healthy’ artificial light, we can ensure that rooms with insufficient daylight are still able to cater for our needs. Giving our mood and biorhythm a lovely boost… In this context we would like to tell you a little more about CRI or the Colour Rendering Index. 

What is CRI?

CRI or the Colour Rendering Index is a value between 1 and 100, indicating how accurately a particular light source reflects the true colour of an object. Daylight is considered the benchmark and is therefore given a CRI of 100. Colour rendering comes closest to reality at a CRI of 100. 

Attention! The colour temperature (Kelvin) of a light source has no impact on the CRI. This means that a warm white light source, which spreads a rather yellow light, can have the same CRI as a cold white light source.

This picturenicely illustrates the impact of CRI and colour temperature on how you perceive something. This way you can see perfectly how you can determine the atmosphere of your interior with the choice of the right light.

So what should you know before choosing LED lighting?

CRI shows how closely artificial light gets to normal daylight

The colour temperature affects the rendering of, e.g., how we perceive colours. When talking about colour temperature you often hear the terms ‘warm’ and ‘cold’

Always select your light source to suit the purpose: do you wish to create ambiance, do you need the light to be able to work, do you wish to put something in the spotlight, and so on? Read more about this topic in the article: What is colour temperature?