It is tough to say at this point which I prefer. Dome on or off.
The dome on tint was a bit better and it most likely had more lumens, although it does not seem to have lost as many lumens as the old xhp70 did without a dome.
The biggest gain is the (almost) elimination of the dark spot.
I was never a fan of sliced domes on the old XHP70 but this one is not bad.
All said and done, if the dark spot could be eliminated with the dome on, I personally would most likely just leave it like that. 1300m of throw is more then enough and the larger hotspot and better tine are good.
With the dark spot as it is right now, I would say it is a toss up. Once I get the V1 prototype back I will most likely try a dome on vs dome off side by side comparison.
Now if Lumintop could be talked into reworking the reflector to eliminate the dark spot and making the xhp70 mcpcb, then that would really open up options.
The xhp50.2 would be an interesting match, I have one here but no mcpcb for it that would fit.
Although given the results with the xhp70.2, personally I think I would go for the higher output it offers and live with a bit less throw.
I don’t think that is physically possible without reducing the throw.
A reflector shaped for maximum throw is always going to be weaker in the middle of the hotspot.
You could get a smoother hotspot 4 ways, but they all reduce throw:
Adding texture to the reflector
Adding a light diffuser film to the lens
Offseting the emitter to the side a little.
Unfocus the emitter up and down, depth wise with the reflector.
When I was chasing throw with my L6 I tried all kinds of experiments, But ultimately I decided to make the hotspot look nice to me regardless of what the throw numbers said.
Yep, that is what I was getting at. The reduction in throw is generally worth the better beam I have found. For example going to an SMO reflector in the L6 makes the beam not nearly as pretty to look at but only gains a little throw. So I stuck with the OP reflector.
In general I prefer the OP reflectors myself but not really what we are going for here.
The beam is pretty good, it only needs a little push to make it really good with the dome on.
Really? I got good gains and a nice looking beam. Only a tiny big darker in center, but hard to see. Here’s my L6 with SMO at 2 different exposure settings. I thought it looked pretty good.
Ps, I don’t want to go too off topic in you 70.2 thread.
It is like the smaller one you have there. I have found it to be a pretty good analog for common flashlight sizes for most LED’s. This XHP70 is the first one I have even considered the heatsink being an issue with.
I tried to drill into a larger one like you have about 6 times and I have 6 broken drill bits to show for my effort.
If someone can drill and tap a heat sink like that for both 16mm and 20mm stars (with fan of course) I would be happy to take it off your hands.
The larger one has a vapour chamber in the center, if you drill into that one it will stop functioning properly.
There are coolers far better than any of the ones intel makes though, but something good like a NH-D14/15 from a used site like craigslist.
Yeah that is what I thought. I was going to say that I would not touch it, but Enderman said it first.
Also, for testing even something like an SST90, Noctua’s cooler would be a bit overkill. For these big LEDS overdriven, it would leave a comfortable margin for pushing the emitters.
Finally, to drill them would be a bad thing as Texas Ace, as it would break the heatpipes.
However, as Barkuti said, mixing thermal paste with thermal silicone works very well as to fix a very high power LED to a suitable heatsink, if you have a ratio of 5-7% thermal glue, and 95% thermal paste.
I’m currently doing that with my XHP 50.2 in my Imgur link, and it works wonderfully, until the smaller heatsink can’t handle it passively at about 30W.
The large heatpipe copper bases are very useful though: very powerful multi-emitter constant brightness floodlights, or just a monster light, like the Storm of Ra.
But for testing, they are a bit problematic if you want to mount them using screws.
Only the large intel heatsinks (like BXTS13A) have the vapour chamber in the middle, the small stock ones don’t.
The thing is that the more power the LED uses the hotter it will get with that tiny heatsink, and as we all know, higher temp = lower output.
I can guarantee you that the small heatsink you used had the XHP70.2 at over 100C or possibly even 150C.