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>>> The light is extremely high quality

Which parameters are you using to measure quality ? To me, it basically boils down to >95 CRI, but I know next to nothing about lighting.



Most LEDs will quote a CRI value. There are 15 buckets of color which can be tested, but generally CRI will just be the average of the performance on the first 8 buckets only. You can see the colors of the buckets at [1] or [2].

Higher quality LEDs will quote their R9 performance. LEDs are most efficient at creating bluish light, and use a phosphor to even out the light. Many LEDs lack red light output, which is what the R9 bucket is for. However ideally you want great performance across the full spectrum.

The LEDs I'm using are the Bridgelux Thrive. If you look at page 7/9 (page numbers / actual PDF page) on their datasheet [3], they have actual graphs of the light spectrums. Two pages above that they have a table with R1-R15 measurements.

On the lower graph of page 7/9, the dotted line is a black body radiator at 4000 degrees kelvin. Basically hot stuff glows and the spectrum shifts depending on the temperature. Incandescent bulbs are around 2700 K and make a shitton of infrared plus a bit of red/yellow. The sun is at 6000-6500 K; while it still makes a lot of infrared the spectrum now covers the entire visible range and also some UV and shorter wavelengths.

They plot against that spectrums from what would qualify as 80/90/98 CRI. You can see the 80 CRI has a large falloff on the red (right) side of the spectrum. Bridgelux invents a new number Average Spectral Deviation which just computes how different the light is from the black body radiator; as you can see the Thrive is almost the exact same except for the very deep reds and a small blue bump / green dip (which is a characteristic of most LEDs, you can see the others have a much bigger deviation).

I was a bit surprised to see that the 98 CRI had such a huge deviation in the blue (seems it trades a bigger blue bump for a smaller green dip). I don't know how trustworthy the comparisons are, but at least the Thrive is damn near perfect.

However it's not very efficient, outputting 100-120 lumens per watt. Less-accurate emitters can get close to 200 lm/W. Also there's not a very big difference between the prices of different LEDs, and a different module would likely be a drop-in replacement. So you could nearly double the output of the system I designed if you didn't care too much about color rendering, which would make it somewhat competitive with the market in terms of $ per lumen. There's still a bit of soldering and assembly involved though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Test_col... (only has 14...)

[2]: https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led

[3]: https://www.bridgelux.com/sites/default/files/resource_media...


Wow, thanks. I was not expecting such a detailed response. Would love to see the finished product here in HN




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