LED Lighting - CRI Value

CRI (color rendering index) is a measure of how accurately a light source illuminates objects' true colors.

To get good color images, with realistic colors, it is important we use light that contains a good balance of all the colors. It is somewhat possible to correct the colors in an image in post production using a gray card and whitebalancing, but by already using a good source of light, you can even more so improve the quality of the colors.

Example of the colors emitted by High CRI LED light and normal LED light:

So how much does a good LED strip impact the colors? We compared 2 LED strips:
- normal (CRI 70) LED strip, cool white, 20watts per meter
- High CRI (CRI 95) LED strip, 5600K, 18watts per meter

Our test setup. 2 Raspberry PI model 3, side by side with the 8MP and 5MP Raspberry PI Camera. All other lights were turned off when we took the sample images.


Example with the v1.3 5MP Camera: (click image for full resolution)


Example with the v2 8MP Camera: (click image for full resolution)



The 8MP camera performs colorwise better then the 5MP camera, but as you can see from the sample images, the 5MP and 8MP cameras with the High CRI LED light perfoms much better.

We will try to start offering these high CRI lights from our online store. If you want more information, please email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.