You can see the archived poll results on the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221220093741/https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/72493
With increasing DIY work, and some people here treading lightly into neutral territory, I thought it might be time to have a "tint awareness" poll, to see what people prefer, or if no one really cares, or If we haven't even seen a tint binned LED other than cool white.
I know I'm picky with tints, and I like neutrals, and will only buy a torch with neutral options, or with the ability to mod to neutrals (i.e. emitter change) unless its a really nice torch (Maratac AA for example, which is glued together :()
Warm White Fluro lamp, 5A tint XR-E, 4B tint XP-G, Cool white GDP, Cool white XR-E Q5.
TRUE! lol so what to do with this one, oh well, it can dissapear into the depths of the forum too... seems option "I should search forums harder" seems to apply here haha!
I already voted! I like a neutral in the 5's, which is almost warm. But I don't see the point of a true warm which are just too orange.
I guess the next question is, Where are people buying neutral tinted LEDs, or do we not bother?
I've got mine from KD, the XR-E 5A, the XP-G 4B, and the SST-50 4500k neutral.
I'm about to order some XM-L 5 tint neutrals. Edit. I just ordered some XM-L neutrals, and an XP-G neutral 5B1 from cutter
When I visited GoingGear's store, I asked Marshall about why there aren't more neutral flashlights. He said there is a small vocal minority of flashlight enthusiasts who say they want them, but realistically he has a hard time selling them and people aren't really asking for them. I just don't think people know other tints are available and the cool whites tend to be more plentiful and cheaper, so the flashlight companies aren't going to provide it if they don't have to.
I'm not too bothered. A warmer tint is better for depth perception than a bluer one. I don't know why this is but some of my brighter LED lights make the world outdoors look like it is 2 dimensional. Most of my use of lights is indoor so I'm not that worried about tint though I have a strong dislike of greenish tints.
Voted for cool white.
I'm never convinced by the colour people call "Neutral" it seems rather yellow to me, but perhapse that is their aim - to make it look like the artifical lights peopel are used to.
Anyway...there are no shades of white, it's either white or it isn't....so I'd like white please :)
Neutral light on the way, but looks like it will be more warm than white to me :bigsmile:
And yeah, I'd like white also. Whiter - better.
PS:
5A tint XR-E (at least on my monitor) looks whiter than 4B tint XP-G, that has slightly green tint. The other two are too blue.
White balance is imposible to capture right (and our eyes adjust to it too) but your right that the 4B is more green. According to the cree charts, the 4B is technically closer to the white line, but slightly on the green side as observed. The 5A is actually further from the 'true white" line, and more orange red.
TO my eyes, compared to daylight, The 5A is visibly more orange/red than sunlight. The 4B is closest to white, slightly on the green. This all conforms to the chart pretty accurately.
The closest tint to daylight in my room, when lighting up the white tabletop surface comparing to ambient light through the window is the 4B tint, however the 4B tint is still a tad too blue. According to the chart, which I confirm to be pretty accurate compared to what I see, I would then say that a 5B1 tint should be a very nice tint in the context of ambient light on my table. I've ordered one of those from cutter and I will see how it looks in a weeks time. Need to decide which torch gets this emitter.
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I prefer incans. 
I think people will say one thing when they have absolutely no clue ..I think tint is so hard and so subjective ..and i can'd tell squat from the chart ..i have a ton of different lights and compared to one another I can pick this one or that one and see greenish or pinker tints and maybe a duller brownish/orange or crazyy purple and cheap emmitter grey . but I get lost when lights start shifting color when you crank them up ..or coronas that are pinkish yet the main spot is a totally different color .Seems Floody lights are easier to see as one color but still color shift pretty badly in some cases .
I think the default answer is always neutral .. But I don't think it means what people are saying . It might be easier to ask people what tint they hate . don says he hates green ,that seems somewhat hard to believe since he likes the aa-s1 (the greenest light I own).It's so green it makes the hulk look pastey.
Possibly just a direction is easier to understand than that dang chart .. in this case seeing is believing ,sadly the cameras don't tell anything except maybe the basic direction of a tint. Some descriptive words seem to help me to understand tints ..words like butterscotch,or it's scarey to have 4 sevens/sunwayman /zebra /etc etc etc popping out massive amounts of bad green tints on high dollar lights .. the fact that people want neutral these days is probably just them screaming about the modern trend towards bad tints in higher end lights as well as cheap lights .
the answer may be just get the most commonly used neutrals and try them . But i' wasn't happy to hear that even they can be all over the map .
If I have to guess what I think I'd like it would be4~4500 and high like a 4b or 5c1?
Burn the non-believer!!! :P
After having a range of them, I prefer neutral 5x since (to me) it seems to have the best balance of brightness, color rendition(indoors and out), and easy on the eyes. Blueish tints bother/shock my eyes and the warms tend to "blend in" too much for me (perceived brightness).
With the incans he'll do it himself =D. Just playin ya.
Mine isn't. It has a very faint, but acceptable green tint.
The greenest light I own might as well have a green LED in it - it is a 5 mode Aurora SH0030 which is a nasty Ultrafire C3 clone. It is awesomely awful. I may offer it some day as a booby prize. The winner gets one of them the second place gets two of them and so on. I did review it on Jayki.
I spend every working day in an office lit with "daylight" fluorescent tubes. They are horribly blue with a hint of green - think a major cyan colour cast. It makes everyone look like a 3-day corpse. And these are supposed to be better than the previous tubes. And they are bright enough that the EU Optical Radiation Directive of 2009 requires me to warn everyone entering my office not to look directly at the horrible things. Yup - I got the departmental Health and Safety job... Those not resident in the EU - just don't ask! I might just hand you the 15,000 page file on the topic. I had to read every word of that. And write my own variants on it.
It was a lot worse when I got the same H&S role in a place that worked with a lot of genuinely dangerous materials. The COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health) regulations get to be real entertaining when you spend your working day amongst fun stuff like ozone, benzo(alpha)pyrenes, tetrachloromethane, hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen fluoride, lead azide and other fun compounds.
Lead arsenate was my favourite. I'm told it tastes very sweet. I guess they buried the guy who found that one out.
And I still hate green casts. There seems to be a lot more variation in Osram tints than in Cree ones. Though most of the Osram LEDs I see these days are in German cars. And they are all very, very cool white.
I agree they look on the blue side of white, but that might just be due to the stupid way in which we see colour. Do they just look blueish, because all the other cars lights are yellowy?