How good are CIELAB colour differences?

Unfortunately several evaluations of CIELAB have shown that DE* is not a particularly good measure of the magnitude of the perceptual colour difference between two stimuli. The relatively poor ability of DE* to predict the magnitude of perceptual colour differences has led to more complicated ways of computing a colour difference from the CIELAB coordinates of two samples and some of these measures have been shown to be more reliable than the simple DE*.