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Comment by thrashh | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people barely notice poor CRI lights. Heck people will mix bulbs of different color temps and not even bat an eye.

The issue is definitely the power usage. It’s not reasonable to dedicate that much power for the relatively minimal gain.

Also, CRI is a relatively poor measurement of color quality because it measures a very desaturated color palette. You can have two high CRI lights and they will still not match. There are newer color rendering indices like TLCI, SSI and TM-30 to account for this.

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'A lot of people' here being 'Many American men, in engineering / programming who are often unaware'. A lot of the women I have worked with (in dev/engineers) notice and are annoyed by this kind of mis-match. Working in Europe, also most colleagues (men and women) noticed, and made fun of, companies/ stores / restaurants that were too unaware or cheap to notice the problem or fix it.

Light is the prime inputs to human sensing their world! It amazes me people can be so unaware of lighting conditions / problems, when that is how they do a vast majority of these sensing of the world.

What the heck? How is gender or where you live anything to do with it?

Even ignoring the higher prevalence of colour blindness in males, it's pretty widely understood that females have better colour perception.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0341-7

OK… I know plenty of non-engineering people who can’t tell or bother either.

And it’s not simply being aware or not. We aren’t all born with the same senses. I can spot extremely minute color variations on tests but I have never been able to tell small differences in smell no matter how much I try.

Wouldn't mixing bulbs at different colors improve the color rendering? Unless they're the same underlying substrates in different ratios (diode+phosphor), I guess, but I don't think they usually do that.

Ultimatly, what matters is how the light spectrum looks. CRI is just an attempt at reducing that to a single number. Even then, many «daylight» scenes have very different light spectra.

While daylight definitely varies, I believe the spectra for the sun at noon at sea level is reasonably even and would be the main goal (as opposed to mimicking daylight in the morning or towards the arctic).

CRI doesn’t measure vibrant red very well and human skin has that red.

Good comment, thanks. Yeah you are right. I tried to simplify this as much as possible while still providing the gist of "various white light sources can have a different coverage of the light spectrum".

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