Colour evaluation under LED sources

The introduction of LED light sources for indoor lighting has rapidly changed the lighting world, introducing important changes. The technology of this type of light sources is continuously evolving making LED systems more and more efficient and long lasting. At the same time costs are decreasing while LED use in the common lighting practice is increasing. Given their spectral power distributions (SPDs), which is very different from traditional light sources' ones, a revision of the colour rendering properties was needed and the concept of colour quality has been introduced. Nowadays, lighting designers can choose white light LED from a great range of CCTs, while also guaranteeing high colour rendering indices (CRI). However an important topic, that has already been the object of investigation but needs further research, is how people perceive an environment and the objects inside it when SPDs and consequently CCTs are different. The aim of the present study is to compare the measured chromatic characteristics of the same objects used in a previuos research with the colours' perception of a sample of 10 people. For this purpose a test room with three LED light scenes was set up and a test procedure was proposed and applied. In this paper the first results, regarding a comparison between measured and perceived hues, are presented.