Poll - preferred color temperature

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Poll - preferred color temperature - LED Flashlights – General Info - BudgetLightForum.com

5500K for the win
5000K is good, but too warm for me, i have a cold heart

Oh dang how specific
For our house lights we went for 3500-3700K but these led based bulbs were very expensive so bow I order “warm white” and it matches good

For flashlights, hmm as long as no green or blue is present I am happy but prefer neutral white (the 3A/B I think ) that is 4000k right?

4000-5000k

5000K, got it in my 219b and I love it.

5000 K for me is ideal too.

Amen brother!!! 5500K takes the prize for me too. :+1:

On rare occasions I might do 5000K, if it looks Ok to me……
I’ll even go up to 6500K if there is no obvious blue or green to my eyes.
But 5500K is the “benchmark” for me. :+1:
.
EDIT to add: I usually try to stay 1 bin on either side of the BBL also

It’s odd. My LED house light bulbs are 2700K and 3000K and they’ve fine. Stark white house lights are unpleasant in my view.

For flashlights it’s different. I’ve got a flashlight with an XML2 T5 5B (4000K-4200K) and it seems like a dingy yellow. Of course, it appears very white in comparison to the house lights. I think I’m going to change it to something over 6000K when I get round to it.

Maybe it’s being conditioned by using tungsten filament house lights for years?

I think 3A is near 5000k
and 5A is near 4000k

Also at play here as a variable to what you are observing, is ones own perception of light and color. Room lighting floods an entire area, and (depending on the individual) our brains “normalize” that color temp… so it “looks fine” partially because our brains have auto-adjusted to that as a norm. So those warmer 3000K tints become neutral. If these are high-CRI emitters that will further normalize that warm tint too and the brain will quickly acclimate itself to that baseline.

Conversely a low CRI 4000K flashlight is a single spot of light thats highly portable, and easily taken into various lighting environments. So unless you are in pitch darkness, your brain is going to highlight color differences pretty readily until it has a change to acclimate itself to that norm.

My Manker E11 is supposed to be neutral white, but I would call a slightly dingy beige-yellow. My perception of it though can change depending on what color temps my eyes have adjusted to previously.

Heres an experiment… get your 4000K light, in a dark room white wall hunt with it noting its color. Now get a yellow-orange piece of construction paper, hold it directly infront of your eyes/face. Shine your flashlight at the paper up against your face. Looking through the paper at the sea of yellow-orange… give it 15-20 seconds. Now take the same light and white wall hunt it again. How does the tint compare now?

5000K, 3D has always been my preferred bin but 4500 219’s are just fine too.

Curious… has anyone compared multiple emitters of the same exact tint BIN? How identical are they within the same BIN ?

4500K to 5000K for me. My last flashlight came with 5000K, 80+ CRI Nichias and I really like the whiteness of it and yet still faithfully reproduces colors.

is it also low CRI, (so its missing red spectrum)

more about “tint” (actually color temperature)

from this thread

they vary noticeably imo, some are more yellow, or more pink, or more blueish
besides when we buy lights they come from a batch of LEDs, we dont get to specify the tint bin, they are grouped on a roll with hundreds of other LEDs that each is slightly different, but was grouped into the batch for being “similar”

the two lights on the left have LEDs from the same batch of 3000k XPG High CRI leds, they are to me, quite different in tint, one falls above the BBL, the other below the BBL

note in that photo that the Nichia looks “white”, simply because the auto white balance on my iPhone decided it was the coolest sample in the pic, and set its auto white balance to the Nichia

4500-5000K depending on surrounding light

They all have there place.

Thanks. It was an interesting experiment. The 4000K flashlight looked very white. A 6500K flashlight looked definitely unnatural. A light with a very blue Latticebright LED looked downright weird, but it always does.

Then I tried hunting around with a halogen lantern - I have a couple I built chargers for and I can’t bring myself to throw them away. I remember years ago when they were bought they seemed to have an incredible light output and were very white compared to even a good light with a krypton bulb. It seemed very yellow compared with the 4000K Led flashlight and rather dim. Also. it’s irritating seeing the artefacts in the beam compared to what we’ve come to expect from halfway reasonable LED flashlights.

For my flashlights, 4000k

For flashlights 5000K… Tints 3A, 3C and 3D.

For home 4000K… cosy… 5C1-ish…

Of the lights I have my current favorite tint is the u3 3d xml2 in the s2 I built. For me the c tints are a bit too greenish.