Without a doubt, color rendition is a key subject of fascination – or lament? – among advanced lighting users. A lot of confusion reigns on this topic, for at least one good reason: it’s complicated! Having been fairly involved in the field over the past few years, I’d like to kick off some thoughts.

In 2004, Mary O’Donnell and Susan Pelham opened their first office in the unfinished ground floor of an Orlando-area office building. Ten years, eleven offices and almost 200 employees later, that same space serves as Westcor Land Title Insurance Company’s headquarters, home to 80 employees working in its administrative, accounting and legal teams.

The Illumination Engineering Society (IES) recently published a “position statement” (PS-8-14) which states that color rendering “requirements should not be a metric used in energy regulations to characterize color attributes for solid state lighting.” This unfortunate wording has caused unnecessary headaches within the lighting community, but what the well-intentioned IES meant to say was that the commonly used Color Rendering Index (CRI) metric is not entirely adequate and a replacement is warranted. We fully agree and are actively engaged with IES to improve this metric, but by no means should color rendering requirements be put on the sidelines while we all wait for improvements!

Soraa, the world leader in GaN on GaN™ LED technology, announced today new psychophysical research proving that whiteness and color rendering have a strong effect on the perception of energy-efficient LED lighting. The study was approved by an Institutional Review Board and led by Kevin Houser at Penn State University.