I fully understand that not all lights are built for throw, I myself love my 75 degree TIR on my Convoy Z1 and 60 degree on the Convoy S21D.
We all know that all other things being equal, domeless throws a little further than a domed emitter, with a very slight loss in lumens that is completely indistinguishable with the naked eye.
Having a domeless emitter will allow a slightly smaller reflector, making the light smaller while still having pretty much the same beam profile OR fitting more emitters in the same size light. So why aren't more lights shipping with domeless emitters?
The LED manufacturers catering for markets other than the (tiny) flashlight market, so I suspect there are other factors at play than throw and lumens.
I’ve actually seen very few LED+ reflector combos in the wild, most are TIR lenses of some variaty, not sure that makes much difference between dome/no dome.
Might just be how the early designs were and the LED companies just stuck with tried and tested, until recently. There are definitely more ‘flat’ LEDs available nowadays than 5 years ago…
Besides what you already mentioned they just cost way more. And there’s not a ton of selection. The market is so small. Like it’s pretty much only flashlight people. And how many LEDs can you really sell to flashlight people? You can only fit so many into each one. A street lamp might have 50-200 LEDs a piece. Idk how many streetlamps are out there but I know my town of 130,000 people converted 15,000 streetlights to LEDs in the last few years and I wasn’t aware we had that many streetlights total. That’s not including how many they put in government buildings, schools, hospitals, etc.
Can sell more LEDs to one city than to all the flashlight people in the world. So there’s not many out there.
My question is why they are not manufactured as domeless? One less thing to do for manufacturer = less cost. Why go through that extra step of adding the dome? All I could think of is because dome version has higher forward output?
Yep, dome increases light extraction and allows for a bit of extra output. Though now we’re seeing more factory domeless emitters like the xp-p in 70, 80, and (hopefully soon) 90cri and the HI variants of xhp50.3 and 70.3
The SST40 vs SFT40 is a different situation though since the SFT40 isn’t just a domeless SST40 but a slightly different design underneath
Not really. You could apply a flat protective layer of the same material, a glass lens etc. There’s not much difference in reliability.
The front of the LED is surrounded by air and air is very bad at removing heat. Almost everything is dissipated through the back into whatever it was soldered onto.
Actually domeless LEDs have less lumens because of physics. The dome changes the refractive index so that more light leaves the LED. Without the dome the LED heats up even faster.
