someone had to do it: dedomed Nichia219highCRI :-D

Who will be the first to redome after a dedome? :wink: :stuck_out_tongue:

Djozz, sounds like you had a perfectly good reason to de-domed one! :bigsmile: I might de-dome one of these some day too just to see it myself. I have been thinking about it... :)

I think your picture comparison have limited value as a CRI comparison. The Nichia 219 picture is exposed darker, making all colors deeper and nicer. With same exposure I seriously doubt no one could tell them apart in terms of CRI.

What Pulsar13 thinks he is seeing in CRI difference is just the exposure difference as far as I can tell.

Thanks for sharing various experiments! Highly appreciated! :)

Thank you for trying this and sharing your findings!

You seem to always be pushing the limits and offering potential sacrifices to the almighty emitter gods. Not sure they appreciate being teased so though.

Looks good to me. Looks like you may have started a new trend. I could see some dedoming some of these for more throw. Like that 12 Nichia emitter SRK. It has flood in spades. One could make one of those RaceR86 style and dedome half of the emitters.

I find it difficult to registrate flashlight output quality, with my own eyes I see quality differences (tint,CRI) better than it appears on photographs, and even then it is very subjective (when I switch on my Nichia219 light always feel how nice and clear everything looks, but when I try to point at the several colour differences compared to a non-highCRI light, every individual difference is very subtle, while the impression of the whole beam is quite clear to me)

Something I can still do is make pictures of the different emitters shining on a colour checker cart. Don't expect miracles from that, the differences will also be subtle.

If I was texaspyro I could put just the emitter in the sphere and it would just spit out tint and CRI.

Perhaps the best I can do is put the emitter in a flashlight and report a subjective impression, my impression for now is that the CRI is not at all that bad :-)

I have put the led into a flashlight, but first an issue, look at this picture of the led, I could have noticed it directly after the dedome, but I just noticed it today:

The die is highly reflective, so it looks like there is a silicone film leftover on the die (or those Nichia dies are different from Cree dies in every aspect). And that tells me that I just may have been a lucky b*stard with this dedome; will every dedome leave that film, ot will the next one just take off half of the phosfor like in most reports of (accidental) Nichia dedoming? And would the tint-shift be different (more) if all the silicone was removed? Time for a gasoline dedome! Anyone?

Anyway, the led is in a AA-host I had waiting idle for a while already (from cnqg), with a BLF-mini driver (boost on AA with meh output, sort of direct drive on Li-ion, 2%-25%-100%, no memory, ±1000Hz PWM). I have a Nichia 219 mod (with dome) with the same driver and AA-size, so although there are differences (e.g. the dedomed mod has a AR-lens, that is 5% more light compared to non-AR), some sort of comparison can be made:

I tested with a fully loaded (brand new from IS :-)) Kinoko 14500 IMR battery. I would have expected the same current draw from both drivers, but the light with domed Nichia drawed 1.35A, the one with dedomed Nichia 1.46A, so there's a small difference. The output of the light with dome is 215 lumen, the output of the light without dome 223 lumen. Hey, that is not much different, even considering that the dedomed light draws a bit more current and has a AR-coated lens. It can have something to do with the silicone film over the die, but the 1000K tint-shift tells me that there must be a considerable light loss. The throw of the dedomed light is 5.4klux at 1 meter, the domed light has half of that (as expected from the about double effective surface area of the die).

I have walked around with this light for a day now, and I am not impressed by the output (my current EDC-light is considerably smaller and has double the output on a comparable current), but I am delighted by the tint :-) :-) , it gives everything a sunny day feeling, and I suspect that the CRI is still fairly (or very) good . It is also nice that it is a bit more throwy than most of my small lights.

Hmmm, lost contact in this thread, talking to myself now. Well, I do that a lot anyway, kind of used to that .

I tried to make pictures of the colour checker card with different leds, and after putting them on the computer I corrected the colours on the monitor, I failed in that for several reasons: the exposures are not corrected well enough, the colours do not match the real life colours enough (you just can not catch that with a camera, the worst are bright red and bright yellow, can not get them the vivid colour of reality) Further, if I change the angle that I view my monitor at, all colours change again And I do not even suffer from the bleach colour representation of the crappy monitors you out there are looking at now . To put it all even more in perspective: on my computer screen I like the cooler colours more, in reality the 'warm neutrals' look much better to me.

I get you the pictures anyway because I spend too much time on them to waste it, and although the colours are not the same colours that you see with your own eyes, they do show some of the differences between the leds. Here they are:

EDIT: I redid these charts with a better camera in this new thread.

Very nice pics. Thank you! I will study them later as I have to run.

Yeah, it's kind of sad. Someone makes a contribution, the thread has a high read count, but only a few responses. It is especially true of non-glowing reviews of lights. You know they are helping a lot of folks not waste money, but only a couple members bother thanking the OP for the effort. I'm a huge fan of you substantial contributions to the forum. You are appreciated by many.

Don’t be discouraged. I think your write up is great. Especially the color charts!

+1 to what ImA4Wheelr said.

Djozz, you said you corrected the colors. What exactly did you do?

Do you have these images in RAW? (either way, PM incoming)

Very interesting thread. Thanks for the work and effort you put into it.

Without having one of those charts in 100cri daylight included to compare to, it appears to me that the dedomed nichia has the best cri of the whole bunch.

Here you go,

just made a picture (camera on daylight setting, no corrections on screen done this time) with a slightly overcast sky, that gives the best quality daylight imo (that is very subjective of course). But still the camera does not capture the true vivid colours of reality.

Thanks again djozz. Not sure what to make of that. Scrolling up and down, it now looks like the xml2 0D is closest to that. Do you think that is because you used a different setting (daylight) for the picture in Post 16? I apologize if I am asking dumb questions. I'm not very knowledgeable in this area (cri and tint). I do know that, despite it's relatively low output, I love the Nichia 219 B10 H1.

Sure...de-doming is easy ..

Lets see someone put the dome back on .:P

Yeah, thanks for the charts. Now, I know what to expect from my 5B1 :slight_smile: . The colors aren’t as vibrant as the nichia but it isn’t as yellowish in the greyscale.

thanks for all the charts djozz. To me it shows that the 4000-5000K emitters have most of the colour reproduction fidelity of the Nichia 219, but without the yellow tint that the <4000K Cree high CRI emitters have. Although the 219 appears to be the best of both worlds (CRI and tint), for higher outputs the 3-5 Cree tint bins seem to be good enough. I have a XP-G2 5B on a Sinkpad coming from LED-DNA (less than $4 after discount!), so it’ll be fun to compare that to the 3C XM-L lights I have.

Using side by side monitors (verifying no significant color shift between monitors), my wife and I both pick the 5B1 as the best overall match - dedomed nichia was 2nd, though each has strengths depending on color. As you say, seeing it in person may be different.

That chart appears a little too blue. Greyscale should be equal amounts of each color for each tile. From left to right it should be 0,0,0 for black, 255, 255, 255 for white and 128, 128, 128 in the middle. It’s best to use the actual chart for true colors, not a captured image.

This one should be accurate. If the greyscale still looks off, it’s your monitor.

Edit: New picture.
Edit: There’s a 18ish% reflectivity that I didn’t think about so black should not be 0, 0, 0. So, for comparison, all tiles should be brighter.

From x-rite: Since they exemplify the color of their counterparts and reflect light the same way in all parts of the visible spectrum, the squares will match the colors of representative sample natural objects under any illumination, and with any color reproduction process.

Nichia 219 original is the best - sorry! :wink:

You can clearly see it on the dark blue square (just below the black one in the top left corner) and by the purple square (the third square from the left in the third row from the top). The dedomed Nichia clearly lost a big amount of blue color by the shift to yellow/warmer tint. Comparison to your daylight shot proves this even more.