wouldn’t RGB already include different temps of white?
Well yes, but actually no. You can produce white-looking light with just RGB, but the quality is going to be shit. Sunlight is made up of the whole spectrum of visible wavelengths, while an RGB will only produce a much sparser spectrum with strong peaks at green, red and blue, and not much else. Looking directly into the light you might not be able to tell, but once the light bounces off colored objects things start looking weird compared to natural light. That’s what rgbww lights are fixing by adding wider-spectrum white LEDs into the mix. For white lights, there is a number called the Color Rendering Index (CRI) that tells you how closely a light’s output spectrum resembles natural sunlight. CRI 100 is perfect sunlight, less than CRI 80 is already pretty crappy looking light.
Well yes, but actually no. You can produce white-looking light with just RGB, but the quality is going to be shit. Sunlight is made up of the whole spectrum of visible wavelengths, while an RGB will only produce a much sparser spectrum with strong peaks at green, red and blue, and not much else. Looking directly into the light you might not be able to tell, but once the light bounces off colored objects things start looking weird compared to natural light. That’s what rgbww lights are fixing by adding wider-spectrum white LEDs into the mix. For white lights, there is a number called the Color Rendering Index (CRI) that tells you how closely a light’s output spectrum resembles natural sunlight. CRI 100 is perfect sunlight, less than CRI 80 is already pretty crappy looking light.