What does the color temperature mean?
When you exam the lighting facts on the package of the LED bulb you purchased, you can see the item, color temperature. For most of consumers, color temperture means cool white or warm white. Aactually, there are a lot of more. The color temperature of a light source is the temperature of an ideal black-body radiator that radiates light of comparable hue to that of the light source. Color temperature is a characteristic of visible light that has important applications in lighting, photography, videography, publishing, manufacturing, astrophysics, horticulture, and other fields. It is measured in kelvin. This is too tecnical and probably does not make much sense to people. The table A might make it more meaningful to general public.
Here is a simple test to see how color temperture distorts color. Choose 2 exact light fixtures with white lampshades as shown in Fig-A. In Fig-A, a 2700k LED bulb was installed in the right fixture and a 3000k LED bulb was installed in the left fixture. Amazingly, the 2 exact white lampshades showed different colors. As shown in Fig-A, the lampshade illuminated by the 2700k LED bulb showed the same color as an incandescent bulb would do but the one by 3000k LED bulb showed pinkish color.
The Fig-B showed the result of the same method but with 5000k and 6500k LED bulbs. The lampshade, on the right, with the 5000k LED bulb showed its true white color but the one, on the left, with 6500k LED bulb showed greenish color. You can use your LED bulb to illuminate a piece of white paper to see if your LED bulb can show the paper’s true color. So, now you know how to choose color temperature.
