I keep seeing the color/temp indicators 1A,1B,1C,1D,2A,2B,2C,2D,etc on this website. I know they refer to the color of the light. How do you decode them?
PS - I know 2700K is warm, and 8000K is cool. And I only like warm. Call me bias, but I have 5,000,000 years of ancestors that evolved under warm light. I don’t care how “pure” or “true” advertisements say cool light, my eyes don’t like it. Give me another 5,000,000 years and I can change my opinion. In the mean time, screw cool light.
Yea I’m not very experienced in converting what I see to black-body temp, especially on the cool end of things. I may have went a little far saying 8000K. But I am pretty sure somewhere around 3500K is the light I like most.
results may vary but some of my stock bluish white XML (or latticebright? idk) after a dedome they produce some tasty 5500k range whites that I just can’t find in stock Cree LEDs
I agree that color temperature is important, but since we’re not dealing with black body emissions, it’s important to consider how far a tint is from the Planckian locus (BBL). The ANSI chart has an X and Y axis, but it’s probably best to ignore them. The 2 axes that are important are running diagonally on the chart. The first axis, the BBL (the very faint dotted line running lower left to upper right) indicates the color temperature as represented by black body emissions. The second axis, which is really imaginary, runs top left to bottom right and represents how green or magenta the light is compared to a black body emission. To me, the second axis is more important than the color temperature axis. I like cool white if it’s a good cool white, I love neutral white again if it’s a good neutral white. I would rather have a good cool white than a bad, green tinted neutral white.
My preference is A/D. All of the A and D tints are on the magenta side of the BBL line. The B and Cs are on the green side until you get into warm white (I’m a green hater).
I have cool white, neutral white and a few warm white lights but they’re (almost) all A/D tints.
For Some reason the cooler the better for me. Not so cool the beam looks blue. But a nice white beam looks awesome. I used a plug-in incan spotlight in the car in the weekend, I cringed at the orange beam
As I appreciate the lighting technology of late, incan and the associated beam colour looks somewhat dated. Like a coal miners 5 lumen headlamp in the 1930s lol.
For more brightness, the lights I have around 5000k feel about right without being blue.
However, I also know that more blue light exposure at night will make it harder to sleep, so I’m debating moving some of my light closer to the 3000-4000k range where less blue light is emitted.