Jon sows chaos wherever possible!
But seriously, itâs obvious that the BLFers who voted 4500 were wanting to vote 5000k but tried to appease the warm tint crowd. They would take a small loss for the greater good. Thatâs how we 5000k folks roll.
The HI option is sounding good for a versatile pocket light.
Love listening to you smart folks talk about all the differences in beams and optics. Who wouldâve thought all the crazy differences in optics paired with different emitters? Sounds like youâve almost got it worked out for a perfect combination.
Iâve made this awful vow to not buy another light until Black Friday, unless itâs this one (technically 2). I need this special elegant triple!
I decided to show that a floody light can be perfectly usable outdoors. The treeline is 200ft away according to satellite images.
This is roughly what it looked like in real life with eyes that had just been looking at a white computer screen for an hour; so they were not at all dark adjusted. However the eyes have better dynamic range; the nearby stuff doesnât glare like that and the darker stuff isnât as dark. This is using a d4 219c which due to the cells in it, their state of charge, the lee minus green filter, etc should throw pretty close to the same as the fw3a would with the samsung leds. However the fw3a would actually have significantly more lumens than this d4, oddly enough. Thatâs impressive, from a light with 1 less emitter.
So what can I conclude from this? Well, if this is how it looks without dark adaptation, then with it, I would not need anything like turbo. Furthermore, even this amount of flood is still not even covering the width of the frame; so itâs maybe 55 degrees of light or less before it fades off. As you can see, this is a much nicer angle of view that doesnât make for tunnel vision when youâre looking around with it. It covers a good area with light, so if you were looking for something, I daresay youâd find it rather quickly. If I wanted to look around for longer, of course Iâd switch to something with more mass and heatsinking like a q8, or move up to a c8 or d1s if I really needed to keep whatever was happening 200ft away lit brightly for the longest time possible. But for EDC use, checking out the area around me and then dropping back down to say half of that brightness, which gives you 141ft if this is 200, or even 1/4 of max brightness, which still gives you 100ft, seems like a perfectly reasonable thing. Heck, just for keeping an eye on whatâs within a ~70ft radius would only take 400 lumens or so; the fw3a can surely dissipate that amount of heat with a lh351d easily. Itâll even smoothly ramp down the brightness so you will barely notice the change.Thatâs all assuming the same exposure as here, which is based on a NON-adapted eye!
Somewhat, but to say that most would be happy with 5000K isnât necessarily correct either. I love 4500K and 4000K, but wouldnât be happy with 5000K. 5000K is decent during the day, but I personally rarely use flashlights during the day. For me 4500K is perfect for daytime and decent at night. 4000K is great at night, and decent during the day. Under 4000K is great at night, but terrible during the day.
If it helps at all, I took beam shots of two lights and put them into an animated GIF:
2.1 cd/lm: XP-G2 ~4600K w/ 10623 optic, at 108 lm. (tint is a mix: 5D+3D+3D+2B)
4.0 cd/lm: XP-L HI 5000K w/ 10511 optic, at 107 lm.
The floody one is the closest thing I have to how the LH351D is expected to look.
I didnât attempt to correct for the difference in color temperature. They used the same exposure and settings, and I shot the floodier one first, so it auto-white-balanced for that one and made the 5000K emitter look a bit colder than it should. Both were aimed at the center of the green part of the tree.
So, this is basically the entire extent of throwy-vs-floody available to the FW3A. Theyâre all pretty floody, but not to the same degree.
Nice pics. :+1:
The xp-l has that typical looking TIR beam that Iâm used to and donât like which is a defined hotspot and very weak spill. I dont like that for walking around at night. I have to swing the light around to see left, right and near my feet. I gave up on that style.
The simulated is harder for me to see the hotspot, but it does look like the spill light is much brighter. Something I could hold steady in front of me and see everything as I walk along. Plus it would be better at close range as well. So I prefer this optic shape/style.
With a 10507 optic, itâs pretty much just a hotspot with some corona artifacts around it. With domed Cree emitters, the edge of the hotspot has a different tint than the rest of the beam. It looks pretty good with Nichia 219b though, and would probably look decent with LH351D. It just has twelve petals around the hotspot, like hour markers on a clock â if the clock had major lines at 4, 8, and 12 instead of 3, 6, 9, and 12.
Thatâs the same hotspot-only beam type as the Noctigon Meteor, except the Meteor has 24 petals instead of 12 so theyâre harder to see. Iâm not a big fan of this beam type, but thatâs just a personal preference.
The frosted 10511 optic has actual spill around the hotspot, and blends colors pretty well, but the spill has no defined edge. It can easily be polished to increase throw, or left as-is for more flood. The twelve petals can be seen when looking very carefully, but theyâre mostly not noticeable.
The floody 10623 quad optic I used makes it even harder to tell where the hotspot ends and the spill begins. It mostly just gets gradually dimmer as it gets farther away from the center. No artifacts of any type are visible. For a triple, the equivalent would be a 10508 or 10509 optic. Any FW3A can be made extra-floody like this by changing the optic.
Quick reference:
10507: Clear narrow-spot triple.
10511: Frosted narrow-spot triple.
10508, 10509: Frosted triples with medium and wide spots.
So if you used this frosted optic it will be quite floody. Then if you wanted more throw you could just polish it? That kind of seems like the best of both worlds as long as the people who want more throw were actually willing to do a little polishing.
It averages out to about 4600. Of course, there is no way of telling how informed or accurate the voters were. Some will know exactly what their real preference is, some will be judging it by a few lights they have which may not be exactly the value they believe.
Even if you provided 4600 as the average, it isnât safe, because that 4600 would almost certainly make the 4500 crowd happy, but it might be unacceptable to either the 5000 or 4000 camps, no way of predicting the extent of that. Likewise 5000 may be ok for a larger percentage than 4000, which seems likely, or it may be the other way round if the 4000 camp are more hard-line, which may well be the case.
In order to judge real preference properly, each person would have to do something like side-by-side comparative blind testing (blind as in unknown values) of a range of otherwise equivalent lights maybe 100k apart, settle on one, and then peel off the label to reveal the calibrated value. I would love to be able to do a test like this, but it doesnât seem realistic. If I were running a custom flashlight shop I would set up something like this, similar to having a firing range at the back of a gun shop, but there isnât the market to support something like that.
If mentioning it gets the message delivered of a modest tint shift from ok at low current to very nice at high current, then yes.
But there is âgreenâ in the description, and âtint shiftâ, so what sticks is different from what is intended. In that case it maybe more fair to the led not mentioning it at all
The XP-G3 4000K 90CRI and the XP-L2 4000K 90CRI are ugly green at all currents (as well as all 4000K 90CRI Osram Oslon leds newer than the very first generation, and the LG H35F0 4000K 90CRI), compared to which the LH351D 4000K 90CRI at low current has a wonderful tint. In fact several BLF-members are less than a fan of the rosiness of the Nichiaâs, for them this Samsung led may have the perfect balance in the tint.
And perhaps it needs mentioning once more: in my experience, once using a flashlight in the real world instead of your wall, CRI has clearly more impact than tint, the tint must be really off to make a flashlight unpleasant to use.
I found some tint shift measurements by maukka, and the LH351D doesnât appear to be any worse than other emitters. So, probably not worth mentioning.
Tracking says a prototype should arrive in the next 18 hours, so the plan is to do some testing on that and then put the emitter poll online. I hope the comparison data is in order now, but thereâs still a little time to make corrections. Also, Iâm not sure if the flood/throw pic should be included or not.
Does it have to boil down to just one LED flavor? or is it possible to have two versions right from the start?
What I gather from the discussion of the last few days is that a single LED flavor will almost inevitably leave a good (perhaps even large) portion of potential buyers unhappy.
With two version its much more likely to please the majority.
My suggestions for that would be these two:
XP-L HI 5000K (highest throw, highest lumens, but low CRI & high cost)
Samsung LH351D 4000K 90CRI (high CRI, no extra cost, but least throw) [if the Samsungs are unobtainable for some reason > Nichia 219C 4000K 90CRI]
I rarely use my torches in daylight, but mostly at night, or to peer into dark places.
And I prefer light levels that donât upset my dark-adapted eyes too much, rarely at turbo levels, often at firefly or moonlight level.
Meaning my eyes are probably operating in the mesopic or even scotopic range, rather than photopic.
I wonder whether a lot of tint preference is under artificial conditions, e.g. bouncing off white walls at close range and at high levels, whereas under my sort of usage at much lower illumination levels my eyes see the tint very differently.
I much prefer the warmer tints, 4000K or below, with good CRI, for me the difference is very marked, I donât like cool white at-all, neutral or warm works much better. My theory is that the warmer tints, more biased towards red rather than blue, compensate for the Purkinje shift towards blue sensitivity at lower illumination levels, keeping the colours more ânaturalâ looking.
Edit: which is why it is so difficult to take realistic photos of outdoor night-time scenes, the digital camera does not respond the same way as the human eye. Perhaps someone could develop a Purkinje shift plugin for photoshop to simulate the effect with a set of curves for different wavelengths.
I realise that those who prefer to light things up âas bright as dayâ may have different preferences.
I donât have any experience with the LH351D 4000K 90CRI, but I value Djozzâs opinion. If he likes it, Iâm sure it would be a great choice. Perhaps it would be best to keep the light as cheap as possible, and not go with the xpl-hi, at first. Iâm sure the cheaper it is in the beginning, the more successful it will be. If its a huge hit like Iâm certain it will be, hopefully more flavors will be released later with different emitter choices. This formula has worked will for the Emisar line.
Seconded. 4000K. The floodier beam is a big plus for me too, when out searching for things that could be anywhere, possibly brown-coloured, or dripping red stuff.