It’s not just about long life, low voltage and high efficiency, although there’s nothing to complain about with any of these characteristics.  But the rapid development of high output LED technology has also created the opportunity for new lighting paradigms where the spectral characteristics of the light source can be tailored or “sculpted” to best suit the objectives of the application.

So, how is this done?

Well. It’s not done by ordering LEDs out of a catalog.  The metrics most commonly used by the lighting industry, CCT (correlated color temperature) and CRI (color rendering index), which can be useful for general lighting applications provide very little information about the output spectrum of the light source.  To produce a customized output you must start with the light producing elements themselves, the LEDs.