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
It depends on what time you measure the daylight. Early morning and evening, it’s close to 4000K or even warmer. At noon, it’s closer to 5500K.
I came close to buying 3-4 of those, glad I found a couple threads on them and changed my mind.
then you need to shine the lights on RED things not Green things.
you may also find it informative to shine each light on the palm of your hand, but because an auto white balance phone camera will change the exposure, it may be difficult to capture a realistic color in a photo.
for example
XM-L2 Low CRI w TIR lens with a large hotspot (green in the middle)
same light as above, but added 1/2 minus green Lee Filter (still low cri, makes red look brown)
XPG3 Low CRI w deep reflector that makes a small hotspot (green corona)
N219b 4000k 9050 w triple led behind a diffuser lens, no defined hotspot
Unno, from the pix, 3500K looked the best. The brown sticks/stumps/whatever actually looked brown, not gray. Greens seemed to “pop” that much more.
Fenix E01
Thanks for the kind words
@djozz I appreciate the image you posted, its far better than nothing. Please don’t be hard on yourself.
Of the 5 beams, I like the one on the far right the most. The big yellow one in the middle does nothing for me.
Suggestion
Shooting 5 beams at once is more difficult to get results that resemble what I see. Partly because the lights are not all at equal brightness. For me, shooting 3 beams at once, is sort of a sweet spot to get results that more closely approximate what I see with my eyes. I don’t care much for single beam shots, nor pairs. For some reason they don’t tend to give me the colors I want to show, using my auto white balance iPhone. For people who do have adjustable white balance, I think it most useful to use daylight white balance for consistency. I sometimes trick my iPhone into doing that, by including a Cool White Led as the 3rd beam, just to pull the camera white balance towards daylight.
I don’t own any flashlights with tint that I truly hate, but the below two I am not a big fan of:
- Utorch UT01 NW
- OTR M3 5C