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!
Generally a manufacturer like CREE will produce the LEDs and then they analyze them, grouping them into ‘output’ bins and then ‘tint’ bins.
Usually, when you see a LED listed for a light, you’ll see something like ‘XM-L2 U2 A2’, or a variation of that.
The ‘XM-L2’ part is the family of LEDs, in this case, made by CREE. The ‘2’ would be the second iteration, or upgrade to that particular emitter. The next alpha-numeric pair would be the ‘output’ bin, as small improvements are realized coming off the production line, or in say…subsequent runs. Also, they’re evidently not all uniform to begin with, so grouping helps people out.
The first pair of characters also gives us an idea of where in the evolution, that particular LED is, above and beyond the ‘L2’ part.
Finally…and we didn’t use to see it all that often when I started in 2012, but you’ll now see a second pair of alpha-numeric characters after the output bit rating and that’s the ‘tint bin’, or the shade/color/hue of the LED.
I think this is a graph for the XM-L and it will differ slightly from emitter model to emitter model, but it gives you an idea:
In the earlier days, manufacturers like Zebralight (and most others BTW) didn’t really give two hoots about tint, but that’s all changed.
Some of us are ‘tint junkies’ and some of us don’t care all that much. The warmer tints are pleasing like an incandescent light bulb is to a fluorescent, so it’s a personal preference for the most part.
Chris
Thanks, Chris. I’m putting my flashlight orders on hold until I can learn a bit more about which lights are available with which LEDs. My preference is to get away from the incandescent tint (warm white/yellowish) and move toward lights that not only are brighter with greater range, but trend toward the neutral white. Apparently, not all flashlights can be bought with those tint characteristics.
I’m a bit of a ‘stick-in-the-mud’, but a flashlight is a tool for me to see in the dark. I just need to see and if I’m using my ZL SC-600 with sea-foam green tint on low, I don’t care, since I’ll still be able to see whatever I need to see.
Now, if National Geographic rings me up tomorrow and tells me I’m going down to the Amazon to catalog Poison Arrow frogs, then maybe I’ll go for a high CRI (color rendering index…noon sun on a clear day) and do my thing, but I don’t need a high CRI light to put a water heater into a closet area, or look for a beer that rolled under my truck.
One needs to be careful on banking the cow on temperature numbers, like 3500, 5500, 6500, because as with other things, one man’s 3500, is another man’s 3850, as we all perceive things a bit differently and who knows where these numbers are actually coming from, or how truly accurate they are?
Don’t sweat it, get some various tints and see what you like, but one rule of thumb is that you go cool white for urban areas and seeing at distance and then warm/neutral white for enjoying nature outdoors.
If you look at things like plants, trees, flowers, you’ll notice a real difference, which may be important to you, or it may not be?
Chris
My worst tint is a XML-T6 star that I got last year from fastech. I guess I should have looked at the specs as this one is so yellow it could pass as having a yellow filter.
My worst is the 2 Ultratak K18’s i have. All i know is they are xpg2 and very cold “angry blue”. I really need to change out the led’s.
I’ll throw in one more complication to your requirements:
Warmer tints tend to have greater range, given the same output, than cooler tints, especially in humid conditions. This is because longer wavelengths of light (warm tints) scatter less in the atmosphere than shorter wavelengths (cool tints). So, not only does more of the warm light reach your target, but you also get less light scattered back in your face.
In dry air, this is much less of a concern. But in humid air, a warm light can really make a difference.
I find my lights with the most pure white tints tend to have the worst visible colour rendering. Does an off white tint help with rendering? My worst tint lights are ledlenser P7.2 which has a purple tint, and Meco (Lattice Bright) XM-L cheap zoomy with a green tint.