High CRI White LED Chips/Strips

Hey growers,

Took a bit of time off, but I’m looking go to get back in the saddle again.
With all the recent discussion lately about LEDs and spectrum (Far Red, Infrared, UV) and LED companies starting to jump on the bandwagon of adding monochromatic chips to their fixtures to enhance the spectrum, I’m wondering why companies aren’t pursuing broader Spectrum High CRI White Phosphor LED chips? Are any growers currently using high CRI chips (>90CRI) that could give their opinions or direct me towards a grow journal using them?
I am currently looking to make some propagation/mother lights using the best spectrums can find. Highest electrical efficiency/efficacy is not my main goal here, it is mostly hunting for the best most broad spectrum White Phosphor chips I can find, and delivering enough ppfd to stimulate the plants. I’ve looked through the Spectral Distribution Charts on the most common LED companies and haven’t been super impressed. The best I’ve seen from the standard lot really is the Bridgelux V10 Thrive Series and the Lumiled Luxeon 2835 CrispColor series. If anybody has any better suggestions for usual suspects please let me know.

I will likely be mixing 3000k and either 4000k or 5000k depending on the spectrum.

Here are some screen shots of the SPD’s that I’m referring to with links to the data sheets.

this is the Bridgelux V10 Thrive Series




Here is the Lumiled Luxen 2835 Crisp Color Series

I have also been looking at these strips online as they seem to have a very uniform spd, from a company called Waveform Lighting. Their 5000k strip is rated at 99CRI.


Here is the SPD

for cuttings and veg id go with 4000k thrives.
i have been meaning to build myself some new vegs lights from the 4000k thrive strips for a while now, this has just reminded me to get my finger out..., im off to look at strip availabilty.

I really like those 4000k thrives and even also potentially mixing in some 5000k thrives in some undetermined ratio to try to balance out the blue sides relative spectral power.
I’m also potentially interested in some of those waveform lights for clones since they kinda cover what the 4K & 5k thrive strips bring to the table in one single strip. They are more pricey, but quality of light is the bigger concern for this build. They are still lacking a bit on the DR & FR.

cdgmoney250 said:

I really like those 4000k thrives and even also potentially mixing in some 5000k thrives in some undetermined ratio to try to balance out the blue sides relative spectral power.
I’m also potentially interested in some of those waveform lights for clones since they kinda cover what the 4K & 5k thrive strips bring to the table in one single strip. They are more pricey, but quality of light is the bigger concern for this build. They are still lacking a bit on the DR & FR.

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i think the 4000k alone will be fine.
i prefer the thrives spectrum over the waveforms, as for still being lacking in 650nm-750nm i think thats about as good as it gets with high cri/broad spectrum whites.

nichia make the optisolis 98cri in 5000k and 3000k if you havent seen them.

grotbags said:

nichia make the optisolis 98cri in 5000k and 3000k if you havent seen them.

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I hadn’t seen these yet, thanks for the suggestion! The spectrum curve looks great for a warmer spectrum.

cdgmoney250 said:

I hadn’t seen these yet, thanks for the suggestion! The spectrum curve looks great for a warmer spectrum.

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yer the 3000k with some 730nm monos on another driver would flower great. terrible efficiency though.

grotbags said:

yer the 3000k with some 730nm monos on another driver would flower great. terrible efficiency though.

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i already have some Fluence Spydr 2i’s that I will be flowering under. I just need a little clone light and a few mom lights just to keep them going. Everything is fairly height limited, so crazy PPF won’t be necessary. Not gonna be huge wattage builds, which is why efficiency and cost aren’t the biggest factors for me. I’ve already spent a small fortune on my little personal grow, so what’s a few more dollars. Once the future generations are taken care of, I’ll see about supplementing the Fluence fixture.

Just posting these up as reference for anybody interested.

This SPD is for the Nichia Optisolis 3000k chip


This SPD is for the Nichia Optisolis 5000K

I came across these Luxeon Sunplus 3030’s today that look fairly promising for covering the red to deep red nanometers. These are from their horticultural line. The 2700k - 3500k seem pretty comparable to the Nichia Optisolis previously posted. Anybody got any experience running them?

So this company YUJI LED makes a series of Strips that offer 2700k, 5000k, and 6500k color temps at 98CRI. The 5000k SPD looks amazing, but that particular board isn’t available on their website, and the chips they used to (AP 3030 series) are also sold out in that color temp. I can see why!








The 5000k Strips look like they could go full term all on their own.

Always thought these were cool, since they have a broader blue starting around 405. Think I saw digikey had a couple spectrums in stock, kind of pricey though. I grabbed a few of the 5k from future a while back, so maybe check them out too if you're interested.

loco41 said:

https://datasheet.octopart.com/SMJD-2423072G-XXN100C20E039ALL-Seoul-Semiconductor-datasheet-141900333.pdf

Always thought these were cool, since they have a broader blue starting around 405. Think I saw digikey had a couple spectrums in stock, kind of pricey though. I grabbed a few of the 5k from future a while back, so maybe check them out too if you're interested.

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Those are pretty sweet! Decent efficacy as well! Are you currently using them? If so, how are they doin for ya?

If youre set on propagation only id go for thrive/yuji/seoul semiconductors as the really expand te spectrum on the blue/violet part of the cct. The other quoted chips dont expand so much on the spectrum, the mainly accentuate reds, moving the red peak from 600nm towards 630.

Id like to add one of my own favorites, bridgelux vesta strips (although they dont do much for violets). They give you a 90cri 2 channel strip, 5000k and 2700k, at same voltage which means youre able to run both channels in parallel with the same driver. This gives you 3 separate spectrums to work with which is really nice for a full cycle light.

Pic of a custom light for autos built for a friend: it combines vestas with some mono red supplementation. Worked out as 350g yield for 100w of light on 20/4 cycle. If you sourced some red and uv mono strips you could add both extra reds and uv for a fuller spectrum.
Vestas are about 2.4ppf/w at 700mA (which was the max current of the build, 300w in total) and about 2.7 at 250mA (running the light at 100w total). Used CC drivers for easier wiring, it also allowed me to add the monos with no problems for miss matched voltage.
These strips are quite cheap from my local dealer (beats digi and arrow at least) but only for larger orders.


As for the spectrum vrs efficiency/photon yield: from what ive seen from grows and the little you can deduce from studies: spectrum is more important when light intensity is lower.

I hadn’t looked into these Vesta’s yet, I very much appreciate the suggestion! In that build that you did, were those the 90CRI tunable strips? Just looking through their catalog and I see that they have those Vesta TL in the Thrive 98CRI series as well! I’ll definitely be pouring over some more data sheets. I just wish they had like a 3000k/5000k or a 4000k/6400k option. Seems all the tunable modules are using 2700k for their warm side.

For tunable strips all the data sheets list the spectrums separately, but each spectrum has different flux outputs, so they wouldn’t look normalized to 100% like the spec sheets show when they over lay different color temps on the same graph. It’s nice to be able to compare individual spectrums, but not so nice when you want to see what they look like blended at nominal power. I’m sure someone smarter than me could do the math to correlate the difference in luminous flux to make the adjustments to the relative spectrums manually, but I’d rather just see a spectrometer reading lol.

I love the idea of tunable strips, not so much for being able to go full term (although that is certainly one way to go), but at some point I’d like to mess around with changing the spectrum throughout the day to mimic sunrise/sunset/full sun. And eventually seasons if budget/design don’t get too ridiculous.

Also, I’ve been looking through some different options to cover the DR/FR end of the spectrum with white/red phosphors to get broader nanometer coverage. I think that is probably still the best bet at supplementing for the warm end and filling the spectrum, but supply issues are killing me on that search as well. I’d like to avoid monos if possible, but maybe just a few on separate channel for UV supplementation.

For the visible violet wavelengths, Yuji and Seoul seem to have those covered better than Bridgelux, but both Bridgelux and Seoul have big dips in Cyan region. I guess you can’t win em all, which is why I like the idea of mixing different strips and putting them on different channels.

I do like those Seoul Strips, but there are some pretty big supply issues with a lot of these high CRI modules at the moment, so availability might be in play as well as performance/price.

Rocket Soul said:

As for the spectrum vrs efficiency/photon yield: from what ive seen from grows and the little you can deduce from studies: spectrum is more important when light intensity is lower.

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Awesome post!

And that has been my question for a number of years, but I haven’t been able to experiment until “now” (soon).

“Which matters more for natural plant expression?
PPFD or Spectrum?”
Or is it both?
It is my theory in my mind that light spectrum is the limiting factor in total photon flux that a plant can handle, given the same environmental conditions. I believe this is why plants will often stress indoors under artificially light under high PPFD conditions, and also why maintaining VPD is even more critical. I want to know if indoors, under artificial light of equal intensities, if a plant would grow to a higher degree of expression?

In the same realm of questioning:

Is spectrum a limiting factor in total potential yield?

Will a plant under a fuller more “natural” spectrum be able to photosynthesize at a higher overall ppfd situation under similar environmental conditions, with less light stress than a “narrower spectrum”? In my personal experience, the answer is yes, but it’s subjective and anecdotal. I want to actually test this theory. I remember that side by side @Rahz did back in the day of different color temps and 80CRI vs 90CRI, and those were the questions that immediately came to my mind even then.

Just for anybody’s reference, these are the SPD’s for the Seoul Sunlike strip modules.


This SPD is from their Sunlike COB data sheets, but shows the individual color temps.

I found the SPD’s for two different tunable Bridgelux Vesta Thrive Strips. It shows the different spectral distributions at different levels of flux between the 2 color temps on separate channels. Pretty neat stuff!

cdgmoney250 said:

For tunable strips all the data sheets list the spectrums separately, but each spectrum has different flux outputs, so they wouldn’t look normalized to 100% like the spec sheets show when they over lay different color temps on the same graph. It’s nice to be able to compare individual spectrums, but not so nice when you want to see what they look like blended at nominal power. I’m sure someone smarter than me could do the math to correlate the difference in luminous flux to make the adjustments to the relative spectrums manually, but I’d rather just see a spectrometer reading lol.

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on https://www.led-tech.de/ they have their system live configurator which lets you select from various different led strips/boards/monos ect in different combos so you can see the resulting output. they have some of the thrive strips so you can have a play at mixng spectrums. it would be good if you could load in any spd you can find and see the relative output in real time so to speak.

cdgmoney250 said:

I love the idea of tunable strips, not so much for being able to go full term (although that is certainly one way to go), but at some point I’d like to mess around with changing the spectrum throughout the day to mimic sunrise/sunset/full sun. And eventually seasons if budget/design don’t get too ridiculous.

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imo, the sunrise/sunset, spectrum/intensity thing is a waste of time. when the plants are awake get em grafting as quick as possible. the only daily spectrum manipulation i do is far red after main lights out for end of day treatment.

i think spectrum and intensity manipultion over the course of a full crop cycle makes more sense for pushing quality and weight.