What are the TM-30-18 Color Rendition Guidelines & Reports?

The ANSI/IES TM-30 Standards are an internationally accepted set of guidelines for characterizing the color rendition (color rendering) performance of virtually any light source, such as LEDs.

In 2018, IES issued an update to the TM-30: TM-30-18, which expanded on the original TM-30-15.
TM-30-18 offers more comprehensive evaluation on color quality of new light sources especially for the Solid-state Lighting (SSL). TM-30-18 is now widely accepted as the solid-state lighting color rendition standard and reporting format. The more recent TM-30-20 standard provides detailed guidance on the calculations to be used for objective characterization of light sources but retains the TM-30-18 report format.

In place of the V-shaped Fidelity Index chart in the TM-30-15 reports, TM-30-18 introduced Hue-Angle Bins, shown in the image below. Notice that the circle image in the lower left shows 16 segments separated by dotted lines. Instead of just displaying data points for all 99 individual TM-30 samples around the perimeter of the circle, samples have been grouped together in “bins”, and their average fidelity score is reported on the color vector graphic as R_f (in the upper left corner).

TM-30-18 report. Shown: Luminus LED (30-95-AC40, 3000K) TM-30-18 report.

The TM-30 hue angle bins are shown as a histogram with the average fidelity (local color fidelity, R_f, h_j) score of each bin shown above each column (lower right). Additional histograms were also added:

• Local Hue Shift - the % of difference in hue (color) of the test source from the reference source for each bin
• Local Chroma Shift – the % of difference in chroma (saturation) of the test source from the reference source for each bin.

As this sample report shows, high-CRI Luminus LEDs have extremely good color rendering. For comparison, the images below are examples of both good (incandescent, right) and bad (fluorescent, left) results for the full TM-30-18 Report format for light sources near 3000K. These examples were created using the built-in calculator database example set.

The appearance of 99 CES samples are compared for the test and the 99 reference sources in the bottom graphic. Differences are apparent for multiple samples illuminated by the CIE F4 spectrum. The Incandescent light source (right) is the definition for 100 CRI and therefore has excellent color fidelity.

Full TM-30-18 report format and color difference comparison of CES samples. The “bad” example is CIE F4, a standardized representation of a 2900K fluorescent light source. The “good” example is a 60-Watt incandescent light source (2800K) selected as a representative sample by the CIE.

To learn more, refer to the Help Center articles:

FAQ -> Color Quality Metrics

White Papers -> Achieving Optimal Color Rendition with LEDs

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