Bridgelux released information yesterday on their new line of Decor series LEDs. These are based around the ES and RS series arrays, but where they differ is in the specially blended phosphor formula that is allowing them to hit an amazing 97 CRI at 2700K and 3000K color temperatures.
Bridgelux is aiming these towards markets where accurate color rendering is important, like hospitals, retail, and home lighting markets. Being able to accurately represent colors is far more important in these markets than absolute intensity is, which is why the relatively low 50-54lm/W efficacy is not that concerning. Warm white LEDs from all manufacturers have notoriously low efficacies compared to their cool white counterparts.
Now, there is some misconception as to what CRI actually is, and what it actually represents. I'm going to leave the details to an article that I will be writting soon, but needless to say, CRI is more than just one number. It's an average of how well a light source renders certain colors. Many light sources can have high CRI numbers, but fall flat on their face when it comes to rendering specific colors. That's where this LED is quite impressive.
The above table (taken from the datasheet that can be found here) shows how well it perfoms at rendering each color. R1 through R9 are the standard colors that have been used for years to determine color rendering R10 through R16 are additional colors added to reflect more saturated colors, as well as skin tones. Ra is the average, and is the number used to represent CRI. As you can see, it performs brilliantly across the board (remember, these are out of 100). R12 (a blue tone) does the worst, which is still better than the average CRI of most other white LEDs on the market.
This looks like a home run for Bridgelux. If they can couple this with their upcoming GaN-on-Silicon technology, they will have one of the best, least expensive solutions for getting away from incandescent and halogen light sources.
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