Ikea Solhetta LED Bulb

Mediocre colour rendering – Ikea promotes these as 90CRI, meaning the colour rendering index has an average value of 90%. From what I have gathered, this means the light reflected off objects should be 90% accurate in terms of colour. This is one of the selling points of Ikea bulbs, as most LED bulbs are only 80CRI and render colours in a way that appears visibly… Read more

different to a 100CRI incandescent or halogen bulb of the same temperature (eg. 2700k).

Unfortunately this Solhetta 1521lm bulb still looks quite different to my 100CRI halogen and incandescent bulbs. The rendering of whites, browns and beige colours is shifted yellow, and reds are a bit dull. Subjectively it only seems slightly better than a typical 80CRI bulb. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising as an increase from 80 to 90 is only a 12.5% improvement.

The issue seems to be that the CRI rating is only an average of colour rendering across all colours, allowing it to be highly inaccurate in narrow ranges of colours while being highly accurate at most others, dragging the average up to 90.

Unfortunately it seems the inaccurate colours occur in the most critical colours -- reds, browns and beige, which make up the appearance of many food items and skin tones. For example the colour of cooked meat, an apple, and skin tone, appears a bit dull and yellowish. Here is a YouTube video showing it at 4m19s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb_Do1C5fz8&t=259s

I was going to give this 2 stars, but given the state of the market it is still slightly better than most 80CRI bulbs, and is reasonably priced. Just don't expect accurate colours. For rooms where colour accuracy isn't important they should be fine. Most people are probably not aware of this issue and don't notice colour issues. So for most people this would probably be a 4 or 5 star product.