Color Consistency in YUJILEDS Lighting Products

Color consistency in lighting refers to the ability of a light source to maintain a consistent color temperature or color rendering index (CRI) throughout its operating hours. This is important for several reasons:

1. A consistent color temperature ensures that the lighting environment remains visually comfortable and the colors of objects in the space appear natural.

2. A consistent CRI ensures that colors are accurately represented, which is crucial in settings like art galleries, product showrooms, and photography studios.

3. In applications where multiple light sources are used in the same space, color consistency helps to ensure that the different light sources do not create uneven lighting or color cast.

To achieve color consistency, LED technology has been adopted, which is known for its ability to provide reliable color consistency over time and across batches of light fixtures. Additionally, color tuning systems are designed to maintain consistent color temperature and CRI under various conditions, including temperature and power fluctuations.

Why Color Consistency is so important?

Color consistency is critical in many fields, such as graphic design, printing, textiles, and especially in the lighting industry. In terms of lighting, color consistency refers to making sure that the color appearance of the light remains the same across all products over time to create a uniform look. Here are some examples of why color consistency is so important:

1. Design and Aesthetics: In the lighting industry, color consistency is vital for maintaining the design and aesthetics of a space. For instance, if you install multiple light fixtures in a commercial space, you want to ensure that the color temperature and hue of the fixtures are consistent. A mismatch in color could lead to a disjointed look that detracts from the overall aesthetic you are trying to achieve.

2. Branding: In businesses, color consistency is critical to maintain branding efforts. Suppose you utilize lighting consistently throughout your branding materials or in your physical space. In that case, you must ensure that the lighting retains the same color consistency to ensure your branding is recognizable and memorable. Even slight variations in color can be jarring to the viewer and adversely affect the business's perception.

3. Product Quality: In manufacturing contexts, color consistency is critical to ensure the production of high-quality goods. Any variations in the color of products, packaging, or printed materials can be indicative of manufacturing defects that might result in the products' rejection by customers, or worse, returning of products, resulting in costs and damaging the brand image.

4. Artistic and Architectural Installations: In lighting installations for artistic or architectural purposes, precise color consistency is essential to achieve specific moods and emotional responses. For example, a film set designer will want to ensure that the lighting remains highly consistent throughout filming to maintain continuity in sets. This is also true in architectural installations such as museums and galleries, where the lighting has to remain the same to create the intended ambient effect.

Consistency in color is a vital part of achieving aesthetic, design goals, and product quality. The lighting industry, in particular, relies heavily on color consistency for creating an ambient atmosphere that enhances human experience. Any improvement in the technology and methods used for color consistency will help produce high-quality products that produce desired outcomes.

MacAdam Ellipse

MacAdam ellipse is a concept used in colorimetry and lighting design to describe the extent to which a color can vary and still be considered the same by the human eye. The concept was developed by David Lewis MacAdam in the 1940s, and it has become an essential tool in the field of lighting and color science.

The MacAdam ellipse is an elongated oval shape that represents the range of color variation that a human observer can tolerate without noticing the difference. In other words, the ellipse is used to define a color tolerance range. The major axis of the ellipse is referred to as the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) axis, and it indicates the range of hue variation that the human eye can distinguish. The minor axis of the ellipse represents the chromaticity variation.

Each ellipse is defined by an area that is enclosed by a specific number of standard deviations, typically 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. The smaller the number of standard deviations, the smaller the area enclosed by the ellipse, indicating a more restrictive level of color tolerance. For example, a MacAdam ellipse of 1 SD means that all colors within that ellipse will be indistinguishable from the reference color by 68% of observers, while those outside the ellipse will be noticeably different. Similarly, an ellipse of 2 SD means that 95% of observers will not notice any difference between the colors within the ellipse, etc.

The MacAdam ellipse concept is particularly useful in the lighting industry, where color consistency is a crucial consideration. For example, in a large-scale lighting installation where multiple light sources are used, using identical color temperature or color rendering is challenging due to the inherent variations in manufacturing and environmental conditions. MacAdam ellipses help lighting designers achieve consistent color by specifying the maximum acceptable color deviation.

MacAdam ellipses provide a quantitative method of specifying acceptable color deviations from a desired reference point. This method allows for consistent color in lighting applications that require color uniformity, such as retail environments or art galleries. By using MacAdam ellipses, lighting designers and manufacturers can produce more precise, accurate, and consistent lighting systems that meet industry standards and satisfy customer expectations.

What is it LED Binning?

LED binning is a process used during LED manufacturing to sort LEDs with similar electrical and optical characteristics into groups or bins. The process involves testing and grouping LEDs with similar light output, color temperature, and other electrical properties into different bins or categories. This is usually done to ensure consistent color and brightness across a lighting installation or product line.

The LED binning process typically involves several tests, including a forward voltage test, a luminous flux test, and a chromaticity test. Once the LEDs have been sorted into the appropriate bins, they are matched to the desired specifications, such as color temperature, luminous flux, and current rating, to ensure consistently uniform performance.

LED binning is essential in the LED lighting industry because LEDs can differ significantly in color and brightness, even between the same batch in the same production run. By binning LEDs, manufacturers can ensure that the LEDs they use in their products have consistent characteristics and thus provide consistent performance and light quality, ensuring the customer receives the color-accurate, and consistent lighting result they expect.

The binning process typically results in an increase in the cost of producing LED lighting products because manufacturers must purchase and use more LEDs to ensure the required consistency. The binning groups are usually expressed as a number, such as S1, S2, S3, and so on, with S1 being the bin with the best quality (i.e., the most consistent LED performance). The higher the rating of the bin, the smaller the deviation or differences between the different LEDs in that bin.

In summary, LED binning is the process of sorting LEDs into groups based on their electrical and optical characteristics. This process is essential for ensuring that LED lighting products have consistent performance, light quality, and color accuracy, and it is essential in many applications that require precise and consistent lighting, such as photography, film lighting, and indoor and outdoor lighting installations.

Spectral Grade Regulation

It’s important to remember that color accuracy and consistency are not just theoretical concepts. In fact, they derive from the light spectrum.

As we can notice, general LEDs usually get 25% deviation in time which is the primary reason causing color shift and inconformity, but with Yujileds^® spectral grade regulation we are able to achieve only 5% deviation.

Behind the spectral grade regulation is our elaborative control of the raw materials to reach up to 2.5nm tolerance binning, which determines the absolute accuracy and consistency that distinguishes our products.

Introduce Yujileds^® SimpleBinning solution

We propose the innovative Yujileds^® SimpleBinning solution when most LED manufacturers are providing complex binning systems. The optional bins are limited between 1-2 sections without compromising the color quality, which greatly simplifies the lighting design.

Yujileds^® SimpleBinning provides statistically consistent color performance and with Yujileds^® module the performance can reach 1-2 step equivalent SDCM.

TrueChroma Service. A lifetime data tracing.

What is it TrueChroma Service?

The Yujileds^® TrueChroma Service is a service provided by Yujileds for a wide range of LED products. It’s the tracing and analysing support of every batch of LED production and the database saving data for a lifetime.Thanks to these data we can track the specific raw material information directly to that batch. This service is particularly important and desired for high-end requirements and high-value-added exact applications and is also significant for long-term business development and cooperation.

Up to 0.0015 (CIE x,y) tolerance certification

We take the lead to provide up to 0.0015 (CIE x,y) chromaticity tolerance (based on Yuji condition) as the specification when other LED manufacturers are still offering 0.006.

We all along consider the 0.006 tolerance meaningless except for liability exemption since it is getting close the 5-step SDCM with obvious visual color difference. The industrial LED production generates tolerance indeed but the nominal 0.006 is not helpful to resolve the evaluation of tolerance then the real chromaticity parameters.