I Lowered Duv with a custom paint!

My God my day has been stressful. NM that.

Anyway, Good news! I got the dye thing sorted, made a spray can, and got exactly the results I predicted!

So first some background. I have a lot of fun designing and making things such as a 3D printed trolling motor, a Dewalt drill powered lathe, etc, etc… And I plan to start a YouTube channel to feature those projects soon… And I know how important the thumbnail is to a video on YT, so I came up with an idea to make them stand out… I decided (many months ago) to create a signature paint to make my projects unique and look great. And I did that. For that reason I have a shelf full of base ingredients for paint making.
Then after getting this spectrometer, I got the idea to create a tinted paint that would fix the green Duv in flashlights that so many people seem to hate. It works just like a ‘minus green’ studio light filter. It’s based on deep dye, just the same. But what’s different is you can apply it direct to lenses so it sheds heat and doesn’t melt, and avoids adding new surfaces that add glare. And this way you have full control over the strength of the effect too.
I was going to call it Rosy Duv, but I was concerned that would encourage over-application and over-heating. So I’m calling it Green Delete.
One coat lowers Duv by 0.0020 and only causes 6.7% brightness loss! I’m quite happy with that. Oh, and it causes significant gains to the CRI R9 and some gains to the total CRI :smiley:
Download the test data here and see for yourself.

When can we expect this to be offered?

This could be aeesome but do some testing first, just to be sure about not peeling off under 2-3h load each day.

At the moment I’m just waiting for the coat on my FW3A to cure for a full 24 hours, then I will pop in a fully charged battery and turbo the heck out of it. If it survives, I’m game for making more.

Rock On!!

Yea, it’s an in-efficient process either way. That’s the point of the project, having the control to not add more correction that absolutely necessary. If you like rosy, you must buy rosy LEDs to start with. But if you have some with a green tint, this is a great way to adjust that out.

Alright, so I just got done turbo-ing the heck out of the FW3A with the coating on. The body got so hot I had to move my grip away from the head. But the coating shows no signs of being affected. I reversed the lens (this time with the coating behind, like it should be) and repeated. Still no signs of any change to the coating.

Seriously, I could care less about marketing it. It’s never going to pay any bills.
I expect I will discover price needs to be in the $15-20 per can range to make it worth making. And I expect at that price, it’s not worth it for the average BLF-er.

Based on info posted in this thread, it appears 2 coats of Green Delete is exactly equal to a 1/8 Zircon filter.

—Green Delete 1x (aka 1/16 filter)—
–0.002 Duv
93.3% Brightness

—Green Delete 2x (aka 1/8 filter)—
–0.004 Duv
86.6% Brightness

—Green Delete 3x (aka 3/16 filter)—
–0.006 Duv
79.9% Brightness

It’s not clear to me what brightness means in your context. We need a number that is integrated (in a sphere/lumen tube) as well as some number for candela measured in the hotspot outside the sphere.

Also, when you put the coating on the inside of the glass will the Carclo optic scratch it up when you really crank down the bezel?

I dont want actual lumens either. I want to know not only the overall “brightness” reduction but also the reduction in throw and how it effects the beam shape.

Doubling the strength of the spray made sense to me at first too. Except then it only takes 4 coats to achieve 1/2 -green, and that’s kind of insane and dangerous considering these lights already run at or near their thermal capacity on turbo. Plus, what I call “1-coat” is a rather thin layer, and I know less experienced painters tend to make their coats much thicker than me. And man, you can really puddle it on if your lens is laying flat.

I like negative Duv but not at 20-30% reduction in output. I also prefer less range of shift from low to turbo. If you apply a filter on SST20 for example turbo will probably be too rosy and low outputs fine

I’ take 1 can. You got me on “turbo out of it”.

Would this paintable coating be waterproof?
And more importantly, would it be removable if one decides to swap out the LED, or over coated and made it too pink?

I use Lee filters on many of my lights, but recently have been converting my multi LED lights to have mixed tints. This way, the DUV get’s lowered without needing to use a filter and lower the luminous efficiency.

The idea of paintable coating sounds like a great DIY solution over Lee Filters.

Yes, it’s waterproof. And it can be removed with some acetone, assuming your lens isn’t plastic, because acetone would destroy a plastic lens.

So I see this being excellent when paired with an SST-20, because you get the high CRI of the SST-20, without any green tint.

But if you don’t value high CRI as just want rosy, you should just use an LED that emits rosy light to begin with.

I’d check out a link if you got it.
They are vary comparable in my testing. But the 219b r9080 was dimmer, had a slightly lower CRI, and is of course discontinued so they are harder to get.

A more interesting comparison would have been at max 7135. The SST20 will probably be closer

Oh that. Nobody should ever put a 1/2 minus green filter on anything with a turbo setting. That’s like 50% of the light converted to heat.

imho the only right way to use a filter is minimally. If you get above 1/4 -green that is just an abuse of the tech and doesn’t make sense. At high correction levels like 1/2 -green, the only right thing to do is buy a different emitter that’s closer to what you need.