What is the colour temperature of LED stage lights?
This is asked by photographers a lot. They are happy knowing that Tungsten is 3200 K and Daylight is 5700 K and have equipment set up to deal with this. Of course, the actual colour spectrum emitted by any lighting fixture is a variable set of wavelengths of different strengths. This is true of LED fixtures, including “White” LED’s. Even setting a white balance with one LED state, doesn’t help much the minute you crossfade to something else. Manufacturers sometimes refer to the Colour Rendering Index (CRI), particularly with wider spectrum sources such as white LEDs. Though not without it’s own limitatons, the CRI could be thought of as an indicator of the amount of the spectrum a light source emits. A tungsten light source has a CRI of 100, while those horrible streets lamps that are no use for reading maps (Low Pressure Sodium) might have a CRI of less than 5. There is some basic information on CRI here. So, the actual colour temperature of LED stage lights is not particularly releva
