High color rendering can enable better vision without requiring more power

摘要

For many people, the correct perception of the colors of objects is an important part of life, and today it is being threatened by misinformed policy-making and associated business decisions. Some conservationists and lamp manufacturers have concluded that the accurate color rendering provided by ordinary incandescent lamps is an unaffordable luxury that good citizens should forgo as we employ more energy-efficient alternatives. Though this is not as extreme as suggesting that we should live in cold darkness, it is in the same general direction of deprivation. Yet research has shown that color rendering is important to people and highefficiency lamps can now also provide high color rendering, so there is no longer any need to have lighting that distorts color appearance. This article focuses on the tradeoff between color rendering accuracy and lamp efficiency to show that high color rendering accuracy is appropriate and, contrary to a common misconception, does not intrinsically require greater electrical energy consumption.