DOE research compares the IES TM-30 color metric to widely-used CRI Ra

The DOE has published color metric research that compares the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) TM-30 R_f color fidelity metric with the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) CRI R_a metric and with the newly emerged CIE R_f metric. Members of the CIE have long acknowledged shortcomings with CRI for LED sources, especially in accurately characterizing how a source renders saturated colors such as deep reds, but the CIE has at the same time opposed alternatives such as TM-30. The new DOE work documents TM-30 as more accurate with many sources and also finds near alignment between IES R_f and CIE R_f.

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We at LEDs Magazine have long advocated that the industry should move to the TM-30 two-metric standard that includes separate fidelity and gamut (R_g) elements. But opponents have argued that IES R_f and CIE R_a return similar scores for commercially-available LED sources, making a move to TM-30 unjustified.

The new DOE research was authored by Michael Royer of the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and was initially published in LEUKOS — the journal of the IES. Subsequently, the DOE also published a reproduction of the entire work on its SSL website.

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