I made a S2+ triple today with these leds to see how the tint is in a TIR optic. and it is again different but closer to the reflector optic tint; the close to rosy tint with little yellow from the i3 aspheric lens zoomie was not achieved. Not a bad tint though.
Against my principles here’s a white wall shot that compares some lights (I do not show whitewall tint comparisons usually because they do not represent the reality very well, and people still will use the picture to discuss tint).
left the XP-G3 4000K 90CRI in a S8 (reflector light)
middle top the XP-G3 4000K 90CRI in a S2+ triple (TIR optic)
right the XP-G3 4000K 90CRI in a ‘on the road’ i3 (aspheric lens zoomie)
middle bottom Nichia 219A 4500K 92CRI in a solarstorm SC02 quad (TIR optic)
The Nichia shows brown-ish on pictures which is not true, the blue-ish hotspot of the S8 does not show well. But you can see how the i3 light is close to the 219A while the other two builds have a tint more to the yellow side.
What the sheesh? Now this may sound like a cheap joke but, does cutter gets the majority of high-CRI Cree leds, which may explain why it is so complicated to find them elsewhere?
Moreover, I've not taken an in depth look there but this can be read there:
“14mm Round DTP TPAD MCPCB with the U2 bin XML-2, 7D2, S6 min 90CRI”, which is bogus. That “the U2 bin” should be edited and replaced with an “an”, doesn't it?
These look very promising. I’m ready for a 2700 lumen High-CRI triple!
I’m disappointed about the tint, but I haven’t had the chance to try all mine yet, hopefully there’s a winner in there somewhere.
They’re an authorized Cree distributor and sell a TON of LED’s, so no conspiracy, I’d guess buying power.
The owner is a member here at BLF as well as most other hobbyist sites like MTBR, CPF, etc., been supportive of our “hobby” for more than a decade.
I’m sure that’s a typo on the XM-L2, it’s in one spot on the page header, not the description. Never saw anyone complain about getting stiffed by exaggerated claims.
Most likely. It’s far too large an improvement over the high CRI competition and cree’s own PDF only has 90 CRI LEDs up to R3 bin. The 4000K S3 are all 70 CRI. See page 7 in here .
Nice to see that Mouser has the 4000K 90CRI too. Still not good for Europe, Mouser’s shipping rates are almost as high as Cutter’s, when ordered from here.
No actually. Cutter has real CREE LED's that do not show on CREE datasheets. Cutter gets some exclusive small batches (relatively small) of rare bin/tint LED's that CREE can't list or sell normally because the yield is too small. That's small for the big buyers (say 10K plus), not small for us.
Perfect example is the XPL W2 bin LED's - yes they are real and not listed in the CREE XPL datasheets.
I'm on the side of think'n these are legit and Mark got his hands on rare yields that CREE can't sell to their regular large customers. With small yields of exceptional LED's, CREE can't group them in lower bins because they would be out of spec, and can't list them because they can't make them on demand in high volumes to fill orders.
Ohhh - minor/major issue - he's really bad at emailing. Might not respond at all, might take weeks.
MRsDNF (Steve) lives kind of/sort of close to the Cutter store, visits there on occasion, and can help out contacting them, and Steve is very helpful. He might not be engaged on this thread though, so I'd suggest pm'ing Steve to help in contacting Mark.
I was think'n about ordering a couple of those 7X boards - looks like copper DTP. Gotta check but that TPAD board with the 50 mm optic, or 40 mm with a lens, might be a good fit for a SRK, but you'd have to build up under the MCPCB with a pretty big spacer.
Ohh - hear is an email excerpt I got from Mark back In October. This was about an XHP50 originally:
Hi Tom
Sorry thought you may be aware of this, Steve may want to chime in and confirm as he has been here and purchased non published bins from us on a fairly regular basis. The problem for Cree is they will often yield higher than published bins but only in non commercial qtys, they only officially release the bin once they can supply everybody, occasionally works in reverse, just has Cree drop a led 2 flux bins as they are having a yield issue
The triple xp-g3 4000k 90cri has been available for quite some time at MTN electronics. It seems that everyone is building their lights with Nichia 219c’s instead. The xp-g3 seem to have much higher output than their Nichia 219c 90 CRI counterparts.
Why is this LED not getting any love? Is the tint that bad compared to the 219c? Anybody build more lights using this LED and care to share their experience? Any beamshot comparisons with 219c’s?
I am thinking of putting a triple of this LED in a jaxman e2L… Any thoughts?
I have a triple with this (bought from Cutter) and it is really good. It is not as popular as the Nichia because it has the yellowish corona around the hotspot that all new Cree’s have, and the tint is slightly greenish, that is why people prefer Nichia.
Both drawbacks are quite minor in a triple IMO, and arbitrary (personally I like the slight greenish hue), I can imagine that the extra output makes up for that.
I actually swapped from the 219C triple to a XP-G3 based triple a few months back in my EDC.
I now run a mixed tint setup with a 90cri 5700k, an 80cri 5000k & 3000k emitter setup. Works out to a bit under 5000k final tint with good CRI and good output. I get a little over 3000 lumens on turbo with it but I generally run it closer to 2500 lumens with a GA cell to keep the heat down.
I did have to switch from the 15007 to the 15011 optic in order to get rid of the tint shift but that works great. I now have a nice smooth tint and a pretty good beam as well.
Total throw is about the same as the 219c with the 15007 as well due to the extra lumens from the xp-g3.
I want to build a triple XP-L2 and see what they would do.