So, you're buying light bulbs, or specifying the lighting for a new home, and this term keeps popping up... CRI. What exactly is it, and why is it so important anyway? CRI stands for Color Rendering Index, and you simply cannot overstate how important CRI can be on the overall look of a space.
Have you ever walked through the paint department of your local hardware store, and noticed how they have a small booth, or demo area, with different light sources for you to hold paint swatches under? Well, that's to demonstrate CRI. Every artificial light source does a different job of accurately showing the colors around it. We had it pretty good in the days of incandescent light bulbs, which have a CRI of 100, a perfect score!
However, large energy consumption and short life spans have rendered incandescent bulbs dinosaurs, and their days are definitely numbered. For a long time, this left us in the unhealthy and unattractive world of low-CRI. If you've ever walked through an older parking garage at night, you've seen the AWFUL yellowish coloring rendering of high pressure sodium lighting, which has a lowly CRI of around 25. Parking lots can do better with blueish metal halide bulbs, usually with a CRI around 60. In recent years, the CRI of fluorescent tubes have gotten much better, well into the 80s.
With modern LED technology, most home-owners can find good quality LED bulbs with a CRI of 90+. At Mojo Smart Home, we always recommend high CRI, good quality bulbs, that will bring out your finishes, your art work, your decor, and let you see your home in the way it was always meant to be seen.