What's your light with the worst tint?

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

47s Quark 2AA-X. Horrible

Is what you see during daylight real color?

I’m no ‘tint freak’, but my original Zebralight SC-600 CW is pretty much sea foam green on the lower levels.

It’s kind of pretty.

Chris

Earlier ZLs and even some more recent versions suffer from the ‘tint lottery’, which I evidently lost with my ZL, lol.

Fortunately for me, I’m not a ‘white wall hunter’, so the negatives, out in the field, aren’t all that bad.

Chris

My worst tint is an ancient Fenix E0 Dart, Nichia purple/blue tint. It still works though so I keep it on my key chain.

Amen.

As a rookie about to order his first LED lights, how do I avoid the issues in this thread? Do these variances occur because a given light doesn’t actually deliver its 4000K or 4500K or 5000K or whatever? Or, are they caused by looking at photos, thinking you like 4500K, then discovering after-the-fact that you really prefer 3500K.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

Unless you get a really horrible tint, most lights will look decent enough if you’re a n00b. It’s really only after you have a few lights that you can compare side-by-side and you start gaining preferences (and dislikes).

I wouldn’t fret about it too much.

As I’ve sold off all the lights with tint I don’t like, my worst tint light is currently the BLF GT!