Gadgetory

hey I'm CNS right wrist we've got the lightbulb testing box out today so you know what that means we're testing out light bulbs and specifically we're looking at bulbs that have high CRI numbers that stands for color rendering index and it represents the bulbs ability to make colors look correct so a bulb with the high CRI should do a good job making your reds look red greens look green etc etc specifically we're looking at the Cree T W series LED and the GE reveal LED both of these have high CRI x' in the 90s and they're hoping to offer the same amount of color quality that you'd get from your old incandescent bulbs like this one so let's kill the lights for just a second switch our setup and now here we've got a bowl of nice tantalizing M&Ms sitting under a 60 watt incandescent bulb just a typical normal light produces color as well you can see that these all look the way they should it looks appetizing look colorful looks bright now we're going to switch it out and see how the other bulbs compare first up is the Cree TW series 60 watt replacement LED now this is an 800 lumen bulb that uses 13.5 Watts to put out that same amount of light and you can see the color looks pretty good I'm not sure I'd say it as good as that incandescent light the incandescent CRI number would probably be somewhere around 99 this is a CRI of 93 so maybe not quite as colorful a bowl of M&Ms but still a pretty darn good looking one now we've got the GE reveal LED in place and you can see the candy still looks great but it's a little less bright the amount of light coming out of this bulb is not the same as cream I shirt kind of fading more to black it's not quite as wide a pool of light and that's because it doesn't have as many watts it's not putting out as many lumens it's only 570 lumens as opposed to Crees 800 and that puts it kind of below what you want from a 60 watt replacement the reason for that is because both of these bulbs both Korea and GE are filtering out part of that yellow light in order to give a more even distribution of the spectrum in better colors the Cree bulb amps up the wattage a little bit and that makes up for the lack of brightness with some extra power and you get the right amount of light the GE doesn't do that the GE reveal just filters that light out and doesn't compensate so you get a dimmer bulb that said these colors look pretty good and as we continue testing it we found even better results in some of our other photograph tests you can take a look here at some of the sample images from our comparison gallery the GE reveal did a very nice job the colors all look vivid and they look correct there's something a little yellowy about that Cree light it's not filtering out quite as much of that yellow light and if you look at the spectrometer graphs from our testing that holds true you can see that take a look at this graph for instance now this might look a little unwieldy but these are just lines that represent the amount of light that each bulb is putting out over different parts of the spectrum so right in the middle there those big humps you see those represent the yellow part of the spectrum that's all the yellow light that these bulbs are putting out which is quite a lot and if you look there's that weird kind of W shaped dip for each bulb that's the light that's being filtered by each bulb that light's not getting out of the bulb it's not affecting the color and that's why they have higher color rendering index numbers but if you look the GE reveals W dip right there it goes up a lot further down than the Cree bulbs the Cree isn't filtering out as much of that yellow light and that's exactly what the photographs show also one other thing we want to notice is that the Cree line goes a lot higher and that's those extra Watts the area under those graphs under those lines that's the amount of brightness you're getting and so the Cree is amping up the wattage it's going a little higher it's giving you more brightness so when it filters some of it out it's still giving you the correct amount that's the thing that GE doesn't quite get right I wish it was a bit brighter overall both of these bulbs did a great job the Cree TW got the better price point a longer lifespan and a much better warranty but the GE reveal despite being a little bit more dim it's the bulb with better color rendering it does a better job making those colors pop and look accurate so that's the most important thing giving your consideration for CNET I'm right Chris you