Same. Would be nice if BLF had a poll style other than “vote for one”. Like, approval voting (vote for one or more) and various flavors of Condorcet. They tend behave much better for polls with more than two options.
Plain and simple there just aren’t many affordable (<$30) headlamps with a high CRI emitter.
I went with the H03 and don’t care nearly enough to swap the XML-L2 out.
Zebra = too expensive
Manker E03H = ugly with that sliding diffuser
With a good tint I can see things fairly well I prefer a good tint to high cri. 5000k is my sweet spot. But I still use my cw lights as long as its not pulsar blue. 6500k is the max cw I can go.
I do have a clear c8 with 90 cri 219c it and it has a great beam and tint. Reminds me of a c8 with xpg2 with the dome on. The light just gets hot quickly with a fet drivr.
Not available in the lights (hosts, UIs) I want and I’m not a modder.
Just because you can do a led swap doesn’t mean you always want to, plus some lights are extremely difficult to get inside.
Heck, I can’t even get NW in many of the lights I like, let alone High CRI.
Ya, there ain’t many…
Here’s a few I know of:
http://www.zebralight.com/SC53Fc-AA-Floody-Neutral-White-High-CRI-Flashlight_p_230.html
http://www.zebralight.com/SC64c-18650-Neutral-White-High-CRI-Flashlight_p_213.html
Although I prefer lights with high CRI emitters, for some applications other attributes are more important to me. For example, I went with XP-L HI in my D4 because for me that purchase was about getting the most ridiculous amount of light possible out of a tiny torch.
Generally a nice neutral white tint is good enough for me, and high CRI is a bonus. I generally don’t buy anything cool white unless I’m planning an emitter swap, although I did put an SST-40 in my L2 out of curiosity.
What I have learned recently is that colour temperature, tint, and CRI are somewhat independent of each other.
I was quite happy believing that colour temperature was everything, and the more neutral the temperature, with a certain bias for preference, the better colours would show.
In practice, this appears to be true (at least for me) to a much larger extent than CRI values.
I have high CRI Nichia lights with warm and cool temperatures and to my eye, neither of them represent colours as well as a neutral light such as my BLF A6 set to an equivalent brightness. I compare the three both outside with a wide range of foliage colours and inside with reds, greens, pastel colours, and browns. I apparently cannot see any advantage to a high CRI light if the temperature is not neutral, since it seems to my eye to taint the colours compared to a neutral light, which shows colours as I would expect them to be, despite much lower CRI.
Factory lights usually have only one or two emitter options with unknown CRI.
Fortunately e.g. Emisar’s lights have big palette of high CRI emitters.
I prefer high CRI for indoors. It is hard to feel any difference outdoors when surrounding areas are grey and ugly.
I have a good few of most options, so although I do like hi cri. It’s not always a deciding factor, colour temp and actual tint is more important for me. For example the xpl2 I have had, too yellow so don’t care what the cri is if my eyes/brain can’t stand it.
I tend to use hi cri at home, edc and at work mainly. If I am using a big gun, hi cri becomes less important than a light used for close up tasks. For example hi cri in dedicated throwers is not important for me personally. Yet for a mule , it’s pretty much critical!
So yes I buy hi cri, but it’s just a single part of my flashlight puzzle . If I want a 4500k light with 80cri, it won’t stop me buying it.
Someone said it above. When you’re looking to spot something far away, nothing really matters except that you get light on the person/place/thing that you’re pointing at. Usually, the more light the better, which is why cool whites are used a lot for throwers.
Okay, so… Jaxman and Zebralight. (I’ll throw in Lumintop for ya.)
Sofirn? Thorfire? Convoy? Thrunite? Niwalker? Nitecore? XTAR? Haikelite? Manker? UTorch? Wuben? Fitorch? …
3 brands out of 14 brazillion.
Yah, lotta choice there…
Like I said…
And what I think everybody’s overlooking, because no one mentioned it yet, is that in a reflector light, any kind of tint-shift will of course skew the color balance. Bad enough in a fried-egg beam the hotspot is yellower and the spill is bluer, and who knows what hideous color the corona might end up being.
For a high-CRI LED to be used to its fullest, you need at the very least a TIR lens to blend/mix the colors better and more consistently, or use an aspheric lens or just plain use it as a mule to get a nice even dispersion of light.
That almost certainly means a flooder (narrow-angle TIRs being the exception… maybe), which would usually mean the light would likely be used for close-in work where color rendition matters.
Haven’t had much free time since I started the poll, but really appreciate the votes and responses so far. Lots of interesting perspectives and factors to consider, thanks all!
Also, Maratac and Reylight make some lights with Nichia emitters as standard, but afaik they’re both limited to AA/AAA (maybe 14500/10450?). I have a Xeno E03 with Nichia as well, but I think it was a limited run and mine crapped out.
Kinda underscores my point. The vast majority of mfrs primarily cater to lumen-hounds, and secondarily to those who’d insist on warmer CTs (or at the very least not Angry Blue™).
As for high-CRI… I doubt very many than the handful listed would even know what a “CRI” might be, let alone pay a premium to use a high-CRI chip.
The only Mankers I own (E02H and E03H) are un-modded with high CRI nichia emitters. Those might be the only high CRI lights they sell, I dunno. Hmm. Nope, E01, maybe MK34.
Ah, okay, so 4 out of 14 brazillion… 
A good point Lightbringer, i have noticed with the same LED (not always literally )used in a reflector, optics and mule to produce different tint flavours. Now i admit i have not got it to a point of X LED in X type engine= X tint. But for example, the 219c 4000k is nicer to my eyes in a reflector than in a triple optic. By that, still towards yellow, but not as yellow……….quite yellow!
I mostly don’t. When I get review lights or buy something based on other features and it’s not at least 80 CRI, it gets modded. Those other features usually do have to do with the host or driver.
This XHP70 and this XHP35 HI are recent favorites for applications where Nichia doesn’t really have anything for us.