If you are about to purchase your first lithium flashlight and you’ve done your research, you have probably decided on an LED lithium flashlight. I mean, why not? They tend to brighter, smaller, and run for much longer than their incandescent counterparts. So why should you still be considering an incandescent? Color rendition.
So you’re probably thinking, “What is the world is color rendition?” Color rendering is the light’s ability to render or portray the colors of an object as compared to its appearance under sunlight (or some other ideal light source). Because LED’s produce light in a narrower portion of the light spectrum, LED’s have a lower CRI (color rendering index) score compared to an incandescent lithium flashlight.
Depending on how you use your lithium flashlight, color rendering may or may not be an issue for you. For example, if you work in IT or around electronics and have to regularly determine which wire is red and which is orange, or which is blue and which is purple, having a flashlight with a high CRI may be very advantageous and could possible prevent a catastrophe if you couldn’t determine the wire color correctly.
Below are two digital photos where camera setting were kept constant for both shots. On the top, is a SureFire P60 lamp (Xenon incandescent) and on the bottom, a SureFire P60L LED. Notice the big differences in the color.
I won’t go further into any of the details of CRI and light (Wikipedia is a good place to start if you want to learn more though), but just wanted to bring the topic of color rendering to light for people and how LEDs and incandescents and be quite different.
In closing, LED technology is advancing rapidly and will most likely achieve a CRI score similar to an incandescent in the future, but for the time being, a good-old incandescent is hard to beat when accurate colors are a must from your lithium flashlight.
