Grow lights - what's the best spectrum?

What about all those pink grow lights that are all the rage?  Is there something to them, or is it just marketing hype?

I recently saw an interesting, well-rounded video on plants and light spectrum.  It does a great job of breaking down what's going on, and gives you the scientific papers that he is basing his information off of.  It must have taken a lot of time to research all this!

There are a couple of observations that stood out to me:
1) At 13:57 "So what's 'the best' plant spectrum?  I'm in the camp for sunlight."  Amen, and amen!
2) At 9:41 (he doesn't mention it in these words, but...) the type of spectrum preferred by plants roughly correlates with their food forest layer!

What do you think?

TL;DR? basically, no, throwing pink lights at your plants won't solve all your problems.  Tweaking the spectrum can sometimes help, but it depends on what the plant in question is (even down to the cultivar level!), and how it feels about the light you're giving it. "There is no magic recipe."  If you're not down to the fine-tuning level, full-spectrum white light is usually the best option to start with.

From my personal experience the “Best of the Best” spectrum will always come from HPS lighting… which is overall expensive to run and only comparable by sunlight… so my personal preference is to run LED’s to supplement the sunlight from a window. Sure the blues & reds from some LED’s can look “cool” but eventually the novelty wears off when the plants suffer. I use affordable White/red/blue where the reds and blues nearly can’t be seen where the light strikes.

The HPS lighting usually has extra intensity compared to other lights in the 560-630 nm range as well as a boost around the 818ish wavelength…

Blue to red wavelengths mostly span 435-740 nm with greens/yellows/oranges being between those… but HPS is notorious for high intensity in & out of the full range. So to go with a quote from “Hector and the search for Happiness”: “It’s all of them” 😊