Toward a Replacement of the CIE Color Rendering Index for White Light Sources

ABSTRACTThe CIE color rendering (fidelity) index (CRI) has remained unchanged for over four decades. Most, if not all, of its components could be updated to more state-of-the-art methods. One of the most critical components of any color rendering (fidelity) metric is the test sample selection. This article therefore addresses the importance of uniform sampling of wavelength space to avoid selective optimization—that is, taking advantage of the unequal contributions of different wavelength regions to the general color rendering score—of light source spectral power distributions. It summarizes the development of a mathematical sample set with undistorted spectral sensitivity, the HL17 set. The set is used in a recently proposed update, the CRI2012 general color rendering index. To assess the impact of the spectrally uniform sample set on color fidelity scores, the CRI2012 index values for each of a set of 139 lamps were compared with those of the CIE CRI. In addition, the impact of updating the other compon...