[weeny]

Incandescents don't have a "perfect" black-body spectrum, by far. Neither does the sun; both of which have 100 CRI. The CRI metric was also devised around the incandescent lamp to compare them against fluorescent lamps - thus the fact that an incandescent bulb has a 100 CRI has very little meaning in a broad context.

If you want to compare a light source to the black body spectrum you have to look at their locations on a color chart like the CIE charts - and compare their distance to the black body line. This is called Duv. With binned LEDs we can get a light source closer to black body color than fluorescents, and almost as close as incandescents.

[yaakov34]

If we are going to go into detail, then let's mention that the fact that you've matched the black-body line in the CIE color space does not mean that you've matched the black-body spectrum. Which means that you can have a light that looks "white" to an observer through a lampshade, but which distorts the colors of the surroundings (since nobody matches those to where they need to be in CIE 1931). This is exactly the problem with casual observation - "light looks the same" is not enough.

Anyway, all I meant to say is that the smooth spectrum of incandescents is what people like to light their homes. It allows natural perception of colors of the surroundings. The high-tech approaches to getting there are a) not as good, b) expensive, c) not so good for the environment, once you add it all up. Now, for specialized applications, I am sure that LEDs are wonderful compared to complex filters on incandescents, but that's not the product we are looking at.