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Light-quality is extremely crucial for any light source to be used for illumination. However, a proper light-quality index is still missing although numerous electricity-driven lighting measures have been introduced since past 150 yr. We present in this communication a universal and easy-to-apply index for quantifying the quality of any given lighting source, which is based on direct comparison of its lumen spectrum with the natural light counterpart having the same color temperature. A general principle for creating high quality pseudo-natural light is accordingly derived. By using organic light-emitting diode technology, for example, daylight-style emission with a 96% natural light resemblance is obtained as a high number of organic emitters with diffused colors spanning throughout the entire visible range are employed. The same principle can be extended to other lighting technology such as light-emitting diode to generate natural light-style emission.

We demonstrate the feasibility of using direct contact-printing in the fabrication of monochromatic and polychromatic organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Bright devices with red, green, blue, and white contact-printed light-emitting layers with a respective maximum luminance of 29 000, 29 000, 4000, and 18 000 cd/m2 were obtained with sound film integrity by blending a polymeric host into a molecular host. For the red OLED as example, the maximum luminance was decreased from 29 000 to 5000 cd/m2 as only the polymeric host was used, or decreased to 7000 cd/m2 as only the molecular host was used. The markedly improved device performance achieved in the devices with blended hosts may be attributed to the employed polymeric host that contributed a good film-forming character, and the molecular host that contributed a good electroluminescence character.

We demonstrate a man-made lighting device of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) capable of yielding a sunlight-style illumination with various daylight chromaticities, whose color temperature ranges between 2300 and 8200 K, fully covering those of the entire daylight at different times and regions. The OLED employs a device architecture capable of simultaneously generating all the emissions required to form a series of daylight chromaticities. The wide color-temperature span may be attributed to that the recombination core therein can easily be shifted along the different emissive zones simply by varying the applied voltage via the use of a thin carrier-modulating layer.