Can red, green, and blue lasers be combined to create white light, and can it have a Kelvin color temperature?
Asked 1/11/2013
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Is it possible to illuminate a subject with three lasers—one red, one green, and one blue—so that the light appears white? If so, how would wavelength choice and relative intensity affect the result, and can such a source be described by a specific color temperature in Kelvin?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
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You can get white LED lights that like monitors do actually create white from combinations of very narrow bands of R, G and B light - we perceive it as white of a certain "Kelvin" balance, but if you use a spectrometer, you will see spikes.
http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Light-Emitting-Diodes-dot-org/chap20/chap20.htm
The same goes for fluorescent lights:
http://web.ncf.ca/jim/misc/cfl/
Compared to old light bulbs and halogen the benefit is that they don't emit IR light, ie. waste so much power on heat, which is why we see them as brighter at lower watts. However, cameras will see them as really dim, because the integration of the sensor's sensitivity curve times the emitting source curve ends up rather small, with all those spikes.
Originally by user11455. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user11455
13y ago
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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes, three narrow-band red, green, and blue sources can be mixed so the eye perceives them as white, similar to how some displays and RGB LEDs work. By changing the relative intensities, the perceived white point can shift warmer or cooler.
However, this is not the same as true broad-spectrum white light. Three lasers produce only three very narrow wavelengths, not the continuous mix of wavelengths found in daylight, tungsten, or other full-spectrum sources. So while it may look white to the eye, a spectrometer would show three sharp spikes, and color rendering on real subjects may be poor or unnatural.
Because color temperature in Kelvin is really tied to broad-spectrum light sources, applying a Kelvin value to RGB laser light is only an approximation based on visual appearance, not a true spectral match.
So the practical answer is: you can create something that appears white, but you cannot reproduce genuine full-spectrum white light with only three lasers.
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