Today, I am going to share how many colors can an LED really make. There’s a lot of myths out there so today we’re going to bust through those myths and find out the REAL answer.
The Myth
When LED’s first started getting popular there was marketing material that advertised LED’s being able to create 16.7 Million colors for RGB LED’s. That’s a lot of colors!!!
So with today’s newer RGBWA+UV that would mean LED’s could create….well let’s just say a lot more colors!
But is that really accurate? Are there even that many colors?
When I first started in lighting and heard about the LEDs, I was amazed at how many colors they could create. But when I started in the field and working with LEDs I soon realized that was not the case!
The Truth
If you’ve worked with LED Fixtures you probably came to the same conclusion that I did.
There is no way that LEDs can create 16.7 million different colors. While LED’s may be able to make that many colors, in reality, those millions of colors are not discernable to the human eye.
So, realistically LED’s were only able to produce 10 – 15 colors.
How Many Colors Can LEDs Really Produce?
Some of the original units such as Color Kinetics ColorBlast and Coemar Parlite could produce about 5 – 10 different, discernable colors. This was great because the non-LED lights older than those would usually just give you one color!
Today’s LEDs are coming out with a wider spectrum of color. This allows you to be able to mix and come up with even more colors to work with. It may not be millions of colors but we do have a lot more to work with these days.
The good news is that with today’s technology LED’s are starting to output more discernable colors. It might not be millions of colors but let’s face it, they are getting much better.
Technology shows no signs of slowing down so who’s to say how many more discernable colors LED’s will be able to produce in the future. While we’ll probably never see ANY light that can make 16.7 million discernable colors, the future is still bright!
