Cree’s New LED Bulb May Be the Closest Thing to an Incandescent

In order to encourage wider adoption of LEDs, California regulators recently put in place a voluntary standard to make bulbs more closely resemble the warm white light from traditional incandescents. LED manufacturer Cree said this week it had become the first company to meet the standard, producing a bulb with a color rendering index (CRI) of 93 -- coming close to the quality of light from a 60-watt incandescent. A CRI score of 100 is the closest to natural light that a bulb can get.