While it's usually okay to assume that a light source with a high CRI offers better looking light than one with a lower CRI, that assumption can be incorrect.

While it's usually okay to assume that a light source with a high CRI offers better looking light than one with a lower CRI, that assumption can be incorrect. CRI is a measurement of color fidelity, i.e. how closely a light source renders a specific color as compared to a reference light source, which is either daylight or an incandescent lamp, depending on the correlated color temperature of the light source we're measuring. One problem is that CRI is measured by evaluating color fidelity over only 8 color samples, mostly pastels. Some argue that 8 sample don't have enough coverage, esp. when it comes to reds, which are important for rendering skin tones. The missing red color samples is the reason why folks started using R9 as a metric in addition to CRI. Another problem is that high color fidelity in a light source is not always positively correlated with user preference. For example, there have been light sources developed to render colors in a more saturated way than daylight or incandescent light, which gives them a low CRI but users preferred them to higher CRI lights. The solution has already been proposed: TM-30, which is a new standard that measures both color fidelity, Cf, and color gamut, Cg (essentially color saturation), and also uses 99 color samples instead of CRI's 8. You can read more about TM-30 in the paper here: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/07/f64/royer-etal_2019_experimental-validation-color-rendition-specification-criteria.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/07/f64/royer-et... Or in this product page if you want a more concise explanation: https://www.soraa.com/soraa-pro/technology/color-and-white.php https://www.soraa.com/soraa-pro/technology/color-and-white.p... The catch is that TM-30 has not been widely adopted, and CRI is still being used, probably because industry folks find TM-30 to be too mathy and hard to understand. Source: I'm a former lighting professional turned software developer.