What's your light with the worst tint?

One of the worst tints I met was when investigating high CRI leds, still thinking, being used to Nichia, that high CRI at least provides good tint. Well, the 4000K 92CRI 2nd gen. Oslon Square proved otherwise, it had a terrible greenish tint.

….while knowing better, I tried to do a tint shot of 5 flashlights with different 4000K leds, to show how bad that high CRI Square is . In reality, 4 out of 5 are pretty close in tint, a agreeable balanced brownish warm/neutral, only the above mentioned Oslon Square is ugly greenish. When photographed however, it looks dramatically different, a rainbow of tints and the Square did not look half that bad! I did choose the white balance that resembled what I saw best, but it is hopeless:

Left to right:
*BLF-A6 (5A tint Cree XP-L),
*Nitecore EC21 (Nichia 219C sm4070e R9050)
*Jaxman E2L (Lumileds Luxeon V 4000K)
*Luckysun mini20 (Osram Oslon Square 2nd 4000K 92CRI)
*Jaxman E2L (Nichia 219B sw403 R9080)

Conclusion once more: do not show tint shots, they are nonsense.

Thrunite TN12(2016) warm white.

It has decent output, but was terrible for photography. Introduced a greenish-yellow tint into my photos, which then also brought in a lot of purple while trying to fix it during post-processing. Id rather use my $20 cool white Walmart zoomie than that thing. Id have already swapped out the LED, but the Nichia 219C on a 16mm MCPCB I bought is too big.

I think your photo is very useful, it shows how the Nichias are pink, and the neutrals are yellow

the problem getting the green of the oslon to show, is possibly due to the lumen level being too low, but overall, I really like your photo… probably because Im used to looking at beam shots, and I recognize that pink nichias have very good red color rendering, such as when looking at things with red in them, like the palm of my hand. The low cri LEDs make my hand look dead, and make red things look brown. That is why I never felt a neutral white low cri LED could compete with a neutral white High CRI nichia. Ive tried Cree high CRI, and it tends to have a lot more Green in it than my nichias.

I don’t love green.

One of the worst LEDs for excess green Imo besides the XP-L and XM-L2, is the XP-G3. I have an XPG3 that has a purple center and green corona. this pic looks like the same colors I see, except mine are not in a line.

Bear in mind Im a total tint and CRI, snob, and my favorite LED is the sw45 9080 Nichia 219b. I even find the 219c leds objectionably yellow/green, compared to some of the best N219b, that look pink in a photo.

a note about tint perception
When I use my lights in full dark adapted situations, I notice green a lot more than if I use a light during the day. I think that is because there is a lot of green in sunlight, so a flashlight making green blends in. Also, in sunlight, there is plenty of Red Light, so the lack of red in a low cri light is not that important during the day, when there is ambient sunlight combining with the flashlight beam, such as when an auto mechanic is working outdoors during the day.

different color and tints work differently when fully dark adapted, than when adapted to cooler color temperatures.

so someone whose job is to drive a service vehicle to a job site, on a sunny day, and then use a flashlight to illuminate shadows in a basement, will tolerate low CRI and large amounts of green tint, better, than someone camping in a dark area with no ambient light, or waking up in a dark house to go to the bathroom, or other settings where the brain is not adapted to sunlight.

Olight x7 CW, horrible Green, green everywhere

P60 P1 host with XPG3-S3 emitter. makes a brown-green and purplish-blue beam.

Although, I have gotten used to it.

Reading the above I see that most people dislike* green and yellow* tints. Why is that?

I personally can’t stand any purple and blue-magenta shades, but yellow or green tints looks fine, not unpleasant to me.
Is there some reason explaining why it is green and yellow tints that irritates so many people here? :question:

4SEVENS Malestrom / Pea green / Got it for $45 at Blade Show 2014 from David Chow / Brand new in box. So I can live with it. :wink:

This forum needs diversity training.

lol

The “worse” tint of my good flashlights is on my neutral white Sunwayman D40A. Although at the time when I got it, I liked it much better than its cool white counterpart that I got weeks before. Then I got another neutral white flashlight and it blew the tint away. In comparison, the tint on the D40A looks a little green. By itself it looks fine and still does today, but it doesn’t look as good as my other neutral white flashlights. The cool white D40A looks great compared to the cheapo blueish tint flashlights that have been acquired over the years.

Edited since I just did a comparison and the D40A is not as bad as I remembered. :person_facepalming:

Worst tint of all my lights is Fenix E01. Why Fenix chose to spoil an otherwise wonderful light by using this blue purple tint escapes me.

Any under-powered CW XPG2 horrid blue tint. As you apply more power the tint shifts to a normal CW tint.

U torch UT-01

I bought seven … one is nice, another is acceptable and five ought to be sent back …never mind any possible driver issues . Five funky, foul, green, garbage emitters.

I hate purple and blue-magenta too, but most of my lights don’t have that particular tint
I think Yellow/Green are more typical tints than purple and blue, but they are all equally bad, once you know they are there, which requires comparing beams.

I have heard of one other person that seems to be immune to hating green tint… maybe some people have fewer green receptors? LOL

Any tint that’s significantly off the BBL is generally pretty bad. On the BBL, it’s fairly balanced, whether the CT is cool, neutral, or warm. It’s probably what we’re hardwired to accept as “good” lighting, from a candle all the way up to the sun.

But off the BBL is seen as unnatural light, filtered and not naturally occurring. Green just makes people look sick, and viewing things in that light gives everything a sickly cast.

When I first shined my first F1 at a multicolored carpet at work, my reaction was “Ewww!”. It was just… off. Everything looked sickly yellow-green under that light, including a 100% artificial carpet!

Overly yellow (as opposed to warm) is just as bad. Warm has a decent red content, and is not simply yellow. There’s an overall balance of red and yellow and green and blue in warm-white light. Something that’s just strongly yellow is a sickly tint, too.

You have to look at the whole spectrum of light, not just the “color” ascribed to it.

A sodium light is almost monochromatic yellow, and things look pretty disgusting under that light, yet a very warm light, say 2000K, some objects can look almost as yellow, but has enough content outside that to make things look… warm.

I forgot to mention the first surefire led head the KL1 it had a horrible pink / purple tint on it!!! :confounded:

5700k 90+ CRI is the worst to me
4500k is perfect, under or above that i will consider it “Unreal”

it’s funny. i’m looking for the same answer. i hate the yellow/green tints. but i love my warm armytek wizard. hated the green in my olight m2x(?} one of the first ones with that factory dedomed led. i gave it away. my hlaaa has a bluish tint, but i still have it along with my h53c headlamp. i thought zebralights were top quality, but the posts about tint lottery makes me wish it was easily modded. i’d replace that led in a heartbeat

Wow! That one is awful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a green that bad, unless your camera is hugely exaggerating it.

I have the same model and tint of Zebralight, and while it’s a little green in the corona, it’s not bad for a cool white.

I think the tint lottery was a lot worse in the past. Zebralight did have some issues with the bins they were ordering a few years ago. I think they’ve mostly corrected that in the past couple of years, though there’s always a lottery with any mass-produced light. My most recent Zebralight (SC600w MkIV HI) has a very nice warmish tint, close to a 4000K Nichia 219.

i agree 5000K is the “real” light( someone measured daylight, it’s 5000K), but i’m more comfotable with 4500k than 5700k