We investigate the relationship between goodness measures of spectral sensitivities to actual ΔE performance in the presence of signal dependent noise. We show that the Vora value does not perform as well as Sharma’s figure of merit (FOM). In addition, we show that Sharma’s FOM has issues when the spectral samples include lower luminance data. We introduce an FOM that accounts for signal dependent noise and has a linear relationship to ΔE performance. The improvement introduced by including signal dependent noise in the FOM results in closer relationships of the FOM to colorimetric accuracy in all cases but is especially important when the ensemble under investigation has a wide range of luminance values.