Alright, so I just got done turbo-ing the heck out of the FW3A with the coating on. The body got so hot I had to move my grip away from the head. But the coating shows no signs of being affected. I reversed the lens (this time with the coating behind, like it should be) and repeated. Still no signs of any change to the coating.
Seriously, I could care less about marketing it. It’s never going to pay any bills.
I expect I will discover price needs to be in the $15-20 per can range to make it worth making. And I expect at that price, it’s not worth it for the average BLF-er.
It’s not clear to me what brightness means in your context. We need a number that is integrated (in a sphere/lumen tube) as well as some number for candela measured in the hotspot outside the sphere.
Also, when you put the coating on the inside of the glass will the Carclo optic scratch it up when you really crank down the bezel?
I dont want actual lumens either. I want to know not only the overall “brightness” reduction but also the reduction in throw and how it effects the beam shape.
Doubling the strength of the spray made sense to me at first too. Except then it only takes 4 coats to achieve 1/2 -green, and that’s kind of insane and dangerous considering these lights already run at or near their thermal capacity on turbo. Plus, what I call “1-coat” is a rather thin layer, and I know less experienced painters tend to make their coats much thicker than me. And man, you can really puddle it on if your lens is laying flat.
I like negative Duv but not at 20-30% reduction in output. I also prefer less range of shift from low to turbo. If you apply a filter on SST20 for example turbo will probably be too rosy and low outputs fine
Would this paintable coating be waterproof?
And more importantly, would it be removable if one decides to swap out the LED, or over coated and made it too pink?
I use Lee filters on many of my lights, but recently have been converting my multi LED lights to have mixed tints. This way, the DUV get’s lowered without needing to use a filter and lower the luminous efficiency.
The idea of paintable coating sounds like a great DIY solution over Lee Filters.
I’d check out a link if you got it.
They are vary comparable in my testing. But the 219b r9080 was dimmer, had a slightly lower CRI, and is of course discontinued so they are harder to get.
imho the only right way to use a filter is minimally. If you get above 1/4 -green that is just an abuse of the tech and doesn’t make sense. At high correction levels like 1/2 -green, the only right thing to do is buy a different emitter that’s closer to what you need.
With more current the output scales differently for each LED, 3A is far from turbo and I think the SST-20’s additional headroom will probably equal it or climb ahead at higher currents.
Just want to respond to this post real quick. IMHO, depending on how many applications you’d get per can, I’d think $15 - $20 per can might be a very reasonable price to some BLF’ers. The “average” BLF’er wouldn’t care much about a little bit of green tint anyway.
Like you say, it’s a matter of how many people care about their green tint enough to spend $15-20 to fix it.
As far as how many applications, it would be a lifetime supply for flashlights. It’s a full size can, so you could probably apply it to the windows on your car or house
The SST-20 is a much newer LED, and it’s to be expected that the tint bins available with good brightness bins will take quite a bit of time to actually get.
See, that’s why I think it would be a great deal for some members. Perhaps you haven’t seen the literally hundreds of lights some members have in their collection. If one could buy any flashlight that looked good to them, without having to even consider the green content of the output, it would be a boon to a lot of them. For some flashlights, there simply isn’t an emitter option that is ‘suitable’ for some people. This spray would represent a significant cost savings in both time and money compared to doing emitter swaps when green tint is the only reason for the swap.