A CRI of 78 means a fairly discontinuous spectrum--certain wavelengths are disproportionately present or absent compared to daylight or incandescent. 78 is definitely better than most fluorescents, but not good enough to make me want to light my house with them.
It's not the color of a fluorescent light that bothers most people, it's the spectrum discontinuity. With any continuous-spectrum light source, our brains adjust to the color of the ambient light. This is why we perceive a piece of paper as the same color outside on a sunny day, outside on a cloudy day, and inside under incandescent lighting. (An unbiased recorder shows these colors as, respectively, relatively white, relatively blue, and relatively red--a digital camera shooting in RAW mode gives an excellent example of this.) With a discontinuous spectrum, our brains adjust the best they can, but colors that are over- or under-represented in the light source still look weird to us, and depending on the individual, this can be slightly to very disconcerting. M. gets headaches after only a short exposure, while I seem largely unaffected.
If the bulbs become more widespread through your building, you'll eventually stop noticing their color, because our brains only really notice the color of a light source as it differs from nearby sources. (Except in the degenerate case of single-wavelength sources, like Christmas lights.)
Actually, there's a fair amount of evidence that our eyes don't perceive color at all--our brains apparently add it into our mental images in post-processing.
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Date: 2007-01-17 11:39 pm (UTC)It's not the color of a fluorescent light that bothers most people, it's the spectrum discontinuity. With any continuous-spectrum light source, our brains adjust to the color of the ambient light. This is why we perceive a piece of paper as the same color outside on a sunny day, outside on a cloudy day, and inside under incandescent lighting. (An unbiased recorder shows these colors as, respectively, relatively white, relatively blue, and relatively red--a digital camera shooting in RAW mode gives an excellent example of this.) With a discontinuous spectrum, our brains adjust the best they can, but colors that are over- or under-represented in the light source still look weird to us, and depending on the individual, this can be slightly to very disconcerting. M. gets headaches after only a short exposure, while I seem largely unaffected.
If the bulbs become more widespread through your building, you'll eventually stop noticing their color, because our brains only really notice the color of a light source as it differs from nearby sources. (Except in the degenerate case of single-wavelength sources, like Christmas lights.)
Actually, there's a fair amount of evidence that our eyes don't perceive color at all--our brains apparently add it into our mental images in post-processing.