The shots in camp look great. I am excited for 3000K and 90CRI. I hope these make the cut.
My order of priority: ( I know, my opinion matters 0.0001% and we all know I will buy this thing even if everything is the opposite of this list.)
High CRI
High CRI
3000K perfect. 4000K OK
Shield/Reflector - adjustable or removable
USB charging/Power bank
Efficiency
Dual tint - solves #3, but warm is simply my goal.
I would only be using this on high for minutes at a time and medium to low settings mostly. Efficiency of the LED to me is a far lower priority than high CRI. I would rather carry spare batteries that I probably still wouldn’t need in trade for the pleasantness of 90+CRI lighting. It only takes 20 seconds to swap 4 batteries. I cant swap LED’s easily and I certainly can’t replace the missing color from memories and photos I plan to gain over years while using this lantern…
My brother in law used to yawn when I would tell him about high CRI while shining them around the back yard. Then it happened. We were cooking steaks over the fire and he was using his cool white and probably very low CRI light he loved sooo much. Even on the highest setting while blinding us all, he couldn’t even tell if his steak was seared on the outside let alone see if it was red, pink or other in the middle. I busted out the 219C and he was instantly enlightened. On any setting, our meals went from grey and lifeless to colorful and appetizing with the click of a switch. He wanted to know where to buy the flashlight. Having perfectly seared medium rare ribeyes instead of burnt hockey pucks was a nice side effect as well!
Using low CRI light to find an item in the dark for a few minutes is one thing. Hanging with friends, taking photos, cooking and eating under it all night long is another.
It would be pretty neat if with a dual tint set-up the colour temperature is changed during ramping, according to Kruithof’s theory, but of course it will be more versatile and very easy to operate if at any brightness setting the tint can simply be adjusted (a tint ramp?). I’m really liking this and it will make the lantern even more unique!
Edit: I think a tint ramp is so suiting for this BLF lantern that it may even deserve a dedicated button.
I was thinking it would use a regular brightness ramp, but there would be an additional factor to set the tint blend. Probably an 8-bit blend value, so 256 steps of color control. If the brightness was set to, perhaps, PWM=100/255, the tint value would determine how much of that 100 goes on the warm channel vs how much goes on the cool channel. So, for example…
Tint=0 would be entirely warm (100/0), 3000K.
Tint=255 would be entirely cool (0/100), 5000K.
Tint=128 would be 50/50, 4000K.
Tint=83 would be 68/32, ~3640K.
It would take perhaps 4 seconds to change tint from one end to the other.
The easiest way to add it would be to map tint change to “click, click, hold” since that’s not really used yet, so it would work during pretty much any mode — anything except “off”, lockout, and momentary, IIRC. And perhaps it could also have an automatic mode where tint is determined by brightness, like maybe if tint=0, it would be automatic.
The lantern’s design unfortunately makes thermal regulation not work, since the sensor (tiny85 built-in) is thermally isolated from the emitters. However, this should provide extra room to add other features… like tint ramping.
If the tint goes from 2700K to 5000K, more people and more situations will have their favorite tint, with 254 tints in between there are also more than enough tints between 3000 and 4000K.
This looks too good to pass up!
Please put me on the list for two.
I’d prefer something in the 3000k to 4000k.
Two LH351D 3000k 90CRI emitters and two LH351D 4000k 90CRI emitters with tint adjust/ramping seems perfect to me!
I would really like for the tint to ramp between 2700k and 5000k in the way TK described. Some of you guys need to remember that there are others in this world besides yourself and 5000k is still considered Neutral White and is going to be preferable for a huge percentage of people. Not only that, but as djozz said, 4000k is still possible, so you’re not losing anything by it.
Please add me for a second light. If we can get this in warm white, adjustable or fixed, I’ll definitely purchase two. So hard to find warm led flashlights/lanterns.
