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Well I finally took some photos of the spectrums of my new Lumichrome T8 fluorescent tubes and my Sunwave compact fluorescent. Overall I would have expected the spectrums to be a bit smoother for these higher CRI bulbs, closer to the incandescent spectrum in the first image I posted. But this is all been a learning experience. Again with the previous posted images, my camera is only recording the red, green and blue, in reality there are purple and yellow visible on the diffraction grating for all the spectrums shown.
In any case, the first image is a comparison of the Lumichrome T8, 5000K, 96 CRI bulb to the Lumichrome 6500K, 98 CRI bulb. For these images, the grating was 10' from the light, and the camera was 14'3" from the light. The red phosphors on the 6500K have a smoother gradient than the 5000K, and I think the green is smoother and doesn't have the black gap (missing light) between the green and red. That's to be expected, as the 6500K has a higher CRI. However the blue gradient of the 5000K appears to be smoother, which I don't really understand. If I had a general purpose, low CRI, T8 fluorescent around the house I would test that also, but we have all T12's.
The second image compares a 5000K, 82 CRI compact fluorescent to Sunwave's 5500K, 93 CRI compact. In this case the diffraction grating was 4' from the light, and the camera was 7'9" from the light. It's hard to tell much difference between these images, so I'm not sure what conclusion to draw.
My husband may have access to a spectrometer at some point, which would display a spectral distribution curve. If that happens, I'll post some more results.
Holly
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