That's been voted, debated on -- why was the 3D tint picked for the Q8? Majority rules - some like 7000K 0B's I'm sure, others like 2700K 7D's. I like 5D personally, some hate it... I lost the tint snob battle long ago.
Probably doesn't matter - he can get only what he can get.
With Cree emitters I prefer the MacAdam ellipse steppings (EasyWhite) way. A 3-step or below usually minimizes tint shift enough for my liking, usually of course.
And of course high colour rendering. Efficiency is sort of meaningless to me because of the way luminous efficacy is defined, skewed by some presumed values of human sight sensitivity to certain frequencies. This is, in my opinion, “wrong”, albeit I understand the reasons. For those of you who are going to ask me why is it wrong, bear in mind luminous efficacy has nothing to do with the actual led efficiency as defined by the ratio of energy output at the designed/desired frequencies divided by the raw amount of electrical energy input.
Those values of human sight sensitivity are standardised but are based on actual measurements. There’s some variation among individuals but the wavelength-sensitivity curve is a good representation of reality, not presumed at all.
Led efficiency can be defined as radiation power/ Watt if you like, for some applications that is a good idea, but for light sources that are meant for illumination we have a for this purpose very meaningful unit: the lumen.
I received the N5 BC and N4 BD LEDs and tested their voltages. I measured the voltage at the MCPCB at 2A, 4A, and 6A.
N4 BA from mtn:
2.89V, 3.09V, 3.28V
First set of N5 BC from KD, should be lower VH voltage bin:
2.92V, 3.11V, 3.29V
Second set of N5 BC:
2.89V, 3.10V, 3.28V
N4 BD, should have lower VH voltage bin:
2.96V, 3.18V, 3.36V
I did not measure the output of the latest batch. The voltage measurements show they are not accurately binned with respect to voltage.
Data sheet has a range spec'd of 0.2V per voltage bin, and only 1 amp level of 0.7 amps at 85C. The variance of the 4 tests above are within the range tolerance, though that last test is noticeably higher than the rest.
The amp level and temp of the spec'd ranges makes it hard to tell where they fit in, but I'd certainly expect to see bigger variances in those tests of differing bin ranges... Oh boy....