Very interesting. I've always thought that there was something a bit "off" about LED torches and car headlamps; the brightness is there, but something about the light just doesn't seem to illuminate as well as an old dim incandescent or even fluorescent tube.
Also even limited to visible spectrum, I have not seen any 99 CRI bulbs. The highest one I have ever found are the 98 CRI by YujiLED, but you pay around $35 for a single bulb. It is absolutely not "easy" to get flicker-free high CRI bulbs, let alone ones that cover the infrared range.
You can't buy heat lamps? They are even more infrared and last longer.
Also LED lighting can have infrared, have a significantly more smoother spectrum curve and still last +20k hours without burnout. The cheaper bulb spectra that they show is a blue led + phosphor coating, but there are infrared LEDs, UV leds, and more. You can make quite the convincing sun simulation, even better than any incandescent bulb, but there is almost no demand for UV + Infrared super full spectrum lighting unfortunately. Only movie & theater lights come close.
>LED lighting can have infrared, have a significantly more smoother spectrum curve and still last +20k hours without burnout
Do you have a link to a bulb that you can purchase meeting all these criteria? The only one I'm aware of was this obscure "StarLike" that was never actually sold in bulk. LEDs can be made good in theory sure, but in practice they are all terrible in light quality compared to a standard incandescent.
You would need to see the spectra of the various LEDs available and create a mix along with phosphor mixes. The closest thing is something like a BLAIR-CG light engine from aputure where they have something like 9 different colors of LEDs that mix together, but they don't put any infrared leds in them because they are for movies and they don't put any UVB or proper UVA leds. But there are infrared, UVA & UVB LEDs that you could apply the same kind of engineering principle to make something that closely follows the sun spectra.
No, you can't buy them as bulbs. The closest thing is those red light therapy panels that include them.
No mention of CRI which seems kind of odd. LEDs for lighting are increasingly graded by how natural their emission spectrum is. Older lights are quite bad, newer ones sacrifice a tiny bit of performance for more uniform spectrum.
They use rf numbers, which is a newer standard, so that's probably good.
However, the experimental group (extra light sources) got rf 91 bulbs, and the control ("LED lighting") got rf 85 bulbs.
The two scales are not exactly comparable, but they both max out at 100. The only source I could find that discusses both says that > 90 CRI is "excellent" and just below that is "very good". It says > 85 rf is "very good", which tells me it's comparable to a mid-80's CRI bulb.
If I accidentally buy a mid-80 CRI bulb, I either return it to the store, or just throw it away.
So, I'd say this study's experimental setup doesn't support any useful conclusions. They showed that so-painfully-bad-California-won't-subsidize-them LEDs are worse than passable LEDs with supplementation from another light source.
The passable LEDs in the study are probably comparable to the cheap ones at our local hardware store, but worse than the ones that cost $10-20 on amazon ten years ago.
This would have been much more interesting if they'd compared high-end LEDs with and without supplementation, and found a difference. (And by "high-end", I mean "still much cheaper then the electricity they save")
CRI is a pretty bad rating system. They are showing the full spectrum graphs which is what you'd want anyway. Spectral Similarity Index (SSI) is the better number
Sure, but I don't see them mention what they're actually using for LEDs at all. They mention a "colour fidelity index" but I'd expect a manufacturer part number or something so I can pull the datasheet.
Funny enough, the best evidence for this study is that they should probably move somewhere with more sunlight if they can't spell "color" right... /s
I think CRI is not important here as thats a measure in the visual spectrum. The paper talks about all the missing wavelength outside of the visual spectrum.
Why is it that right now there is still on the frontpage of an "article being found flawed after 6k citations " ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/aking/ ) but this random article coming out of nowhere makes the front page on the same day?
People really should get it and stop sharing newly published papers to the general public. The value of one single academic paper is exactly 0. Even a handful of such articles still has 0 value to the general public. This is only of interest to other academics (or labs, countries, etc.) who may have the power to reproduce it in a controlled environment.
Be very skeptical of correlations like this that have dubious or poorly understood causation. Be even more skeptical if they are about day-to-day stuff that would likely have large swaths of people able to reproduce something like it on huge scales yet they haven't. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I have incandescent light bulbs at home I have to pretty much smuggle from China. It's amazing how we're replaying the asbestos playbook a century later. Only this time it's government mandated.
I’m guessing the Russian theory that asbestos is totally fine and isn’t harmful? The Russians still use asbestos and say it’s a plot by the west that we got rid of asbestos in our buildings. (Don’t shoot the messenger here, I have no dog in this fight and am not expressing an opinion)
Very interesting. I've always thought that there was something a bit "off" about LED torches and car headlamps; the brightness is there, but something about the light just doesn't seem to illuminate as well as an old dim incandescent or even fluorescent tube.
Someone please tell the Australian government now that we've essentially banned other forms of lighting. (except fluorescent)
You can buy full spectrum LED lights (99 CRI, or grow lamps)
The article uses LED as synonym for typical LED lightning.
How is "full spectrum" defined in this case? Visible spectrum is not the subject of the paper, as they care about infrared.
Also even limited to visible spectrum, I have not seen any 99 CRI bulbs. The highest one I have ever found are the 98 CRI by YujiLED, but you pay around $35 for a single bulb. It is absolutely not "easy" to get flicker-free high CRI bulbs, let alone ones that cover the infrared range.
You can't buy heat lamps? They are even more infrared and last longer.
Also LED lighting can have infrared, have a significantly more smoother spectrum curve and still last +20k hours without burnout. The cheaper bulb spectra that they show is a blue led + phosphor coating, but there are infrared LEDs, UV leds, and more. You can make quite the convincing sun simulation, even better than any incandescent bulb, but there is almost no demand for UV + Infrared super full spectrum lighting unfortunately. Only movie & theater lights come close.
>LED lighting can have infrared, have a significantly more smoother spectrum curve and still last +20k hours without burnout
Do you have a link to a bulb that you can purchase meeting all these criteria? The only one I'm aware of was this obscure "StarLike" that was never actually sold in bulk. LEDs can be made good in theory sure, but in practice they are all terrible in light quality compared to a standard incandescent.
https://budgetlightforum.com/t/sunlike-vs-starlike/64155/7
You would need to see the spectra of the various LEDs available and create a mix along with phosphor mixes. The closest thing is something like a BLAIR-CG light engine from aputure where they have something like 9 different colors of LEDs that mix together, but they don't put any infrared leds in them because they are for movies and they don't put any UVB or proper UVA leds. But there are infrared, UVA & UVB LEDs that you could apply the same kind of engineering principle to make something that closely follows the sun spectra.
No, you can't buy them as bulbs. The closest thing is those red light therapy panels that include them.
Typical electricity rates in Australia are up to 40c/kWh or so.
Do you really think $5 AUD per month per bulb that you’re running 8 hours a day is worth it for better spectrum quality?
No mention of CRI which seems kind of odd. LEDs for lighting are increasingly graded by how natural their emission spectrum is. Older lights are quite bad, newer ones sacrifice a tiny bit of performance for more uniform spectrum.
They use rf numbers, which is a newer standard, so that's probably good.
However, the experimental group (extra light sources) got rf 91 bulbs, and the control ("LED lighting") got rf 85 bulbs.
The two scales are not exactly comparable, but they both max out at 100. The only source I could find that discusses both says that > 90 CRI is "excellent" and just below that is "very good". It says > 85 rf is "very good", which tells me it's comparable to a mid-80's CRI bulb.
If I accidentally buy a mid-80 CRI bulb, I either return it to the store, or just throw it away.
So, I'd say this study's experimental setup doesn't support any useful conclusions. They showed that so-painfully-bad-California-won't-subsidize-them LEDs are worse than passable LEDs with supplementation from another light source.
The passable LEDs in the study are probably comparable to the cheap ones at our local hardware store, but worse than the ones that cost $10-20 on amazon ten years ago.
This would have been much more interesting if they'd compared high-end LEDs with and without supplementation, and found a difference. (And by "high-end", I mean "still much cheaper then the electricity they save")
CRI is a pretty bad rating system. They are showing the full spectrum graphs which is what you'd want anyway. Spectral Similarity Index (SSI) is the better number
Sure, but I don't see them mention what they're actually using for LEDs at all. They mention a "colour fidelity index" but I'd expect a manufacturer part number or something so I can pull the datasheet.
Funny enough, the best evidence for this study is that they should probably move somewhere with more sunlight if they can't spell "color" right... /s
They are not using an index much, they are showing you actual spectral graphs. Ask an AI to understand how that is the actual info you'd want.
I think CRI is not important here as thats a measure in the visual spectrum. The paper talks about all the missing wavelength outside of the visual spectrum.
Out of curiosity:
a) How do Philips Hue bulbs stack up?
b) Did Philips update them generationally and assuming they are decent now, how recently?
Why is it that right now there is still on the frontpage of an "article being found flawed after 6k citations " ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/aking/ ) but this random article coming out of nowhere makes the front page on the same day?
People really should get it and stop sharing newly published papers to the general public. The value of one single academic paper is exactly 0. Even a handful of such articles still has 0 value to the general public. This is only of interest to other academics (or labs, countries, etc.) who may have the power to reproduce it in a controlled environment.
Be very skeptical of correlations like this that have dubious or poorly understood causation. Be even more skeptical if they are about day-to-day stuff that would likely have large swaths of people able to reproduce something like it on huge scales yet they haven't. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You can also look at all the papers it's citing too...
I have incandescent light bulbs at home I have to pretty much smuggle from China. It's amazing how we're replaying the asbestos playbook a century later. Only this time it's government mandated.
> It's amazing how we're replaying the asbestos playbook a century later
Can you elaborate?
I’m guessing the Russian theory that asbestos is totally fine and isn’t harmful? The Russians still use asbestos and say it’s a plot by the west that we got rid of asbestos in our buildings. (Don’t shoot the messenger here, I have no dog in this fight and am not expressing an opinion)