Warm white/ Soft white CFLs are indistinguishable from incandescent equivalents.
Colors
A photograph (see earlier post) of various light bulbs illustrates the effect of color temperature differencesCFLs are produced in varying shades of white:
"Warm white" or "Soft white" (2700 K - 3000 K) provides a light very similar to that of an incandescent bulb, somewhat yellow in appearance;
"White", "Bright White", or "Medium White" (3500 K) bulbs produce a yellowish-white light, whiter than an incandescent bulb still but on the warm side;
"Cool white" (4100 K) bulbs emit more of a pure white tone; and
"Daylight" (5000 K - 6500 K) is slightly bluish-white.
The "K" denotes the correlated color temperature in kelvins. Color temperature is a quantitative measure. The higher the number, the “cooler”, i.e., bluer, the shade. Color names associated with a particular color temperature are not standardized for modern CFLs and other triphosphor lamps like they were for the older style halophosphate fluorescent lamps. Variations and inconsistencies exist among manufacturers. For example, Sylvania's Daylight CFLs have a color temperature of 3500 K, while most other bulbs with a "daylight" label have color temperatures of at least 5000 K. Some vendors fail to include the kelvin value on the package, but this is beginning to improve now that the ENERGY STAR Criteria for CFLs is expected to require such labeling in its 4.0 revision.
Warm white/ Soft white CFLs are indistinguishable from incandescent equivalents.
A photograph cannot really show the differences in spectral quality among different types of light. Incandescent bulbs output light at nearly all wavelengths within the visible spectrum, while LEDs and fluorescents output light at a fairly small number of discrete wavelengths. Light which looks white may cause the colors of objects to appear quite distorted. I have an orange toy pistol, for example, which looks magenta when illuminated by an LED flashlight. True, the flashlight's output looks somewhat bluish, but nowhere near bluish enough to cause the perceived color shift.
Addendum to my other post: are there any CFL-comparison sites that show spectrographs of the different units? I would think spectral uniformity would be far more important than hue or saturation.