Tints imho are always the first thing I notice on a new light and the question has always benn … “ Can you live with it “?
I’ve always said … “I like red “
To me it meant when others would balk at emitters being too red a fair amount of pinkish peachy, rose etc never bothered me .
Green on the other hand … Blue and … I’ve always disliked a dirty beige. These days we’ve got it pretty dang good with the 519A Nichias .
As long as it’s got hi cri the tint can be fixed .
Low cri a whole nother level of ugly
Eh, not always. The SST-20 I couldn’t fix was 95CRI. Meanwhile, a different light in my collection looks pretty good with a filter, despite using a 70CRI SST-20, because it started out with a better spectrum.
A high CRI doesn’t mean as much as a lot of people think.
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There are solvents but they are crazy expensive and not readily available (and not in the small volume most would prefer to have). Goo-Gone (original flavor) is mostly a weaker citrus oil…I think they have something that is more like a paint thinner base as well, but nothing that you’d want to consider for this job. Not sure what the citrus oil may do to electroncs or emitter domes/phosphor but off-gassing of lots and lots of things is bad for most emitters (not sure what it would do to aluminum, either, if it were allowed to sit for awhile). Gentle heat and steady pressure is your friend, though.
EDIT: regarding the solvent, I need to go try to look that up again and see what’s in it but I recall it being things that you can’t exactly cobble together yourself. It’s primarily used for applications where physical removal isn’t wise, like the green filling/retention variety often used on bearings and shaft bushings where access is a bit easier than trying to snake down into tightened thread valleys.
That’s odd because I like the sst-20 4000k hi cri because I’ve been able to fix the tint on all of them .
I’m talking about 10 or 12 emitters that have all turned out pretty nice. Banggood had s2 clones for $6.99 with the old convoy three mode driver that flashed once on low and a 4000k hi cri sst20 emitter. I like the extra throw from the sst20 , the little bit deeper reflector and the better tail standing of the s2 over the s2+ .
A 1/4 minus green filter took these lights from pretty typically green tint to an almost perfect tint . Very similar to the one on the the original post in this thread. When I add a bit of diffusion it becomes incredible.
Try finishing it with diffusion it can really help. Sometimes just diffusing a beam can fix lots of tint issues .
Back when I de-domed XM-L2’s regularly I bought a sheet of tint to kill the ugly green effect of de-doming. I got away from using films, in part because they tend to melt in my usage. It’s a roll of material that I used a good bit but then things shifted and de-doming is not what I do anymore. Still have a pretty large sheet of the FR tint. The SFT40 works for me and seldom do I even slice.
Brightest I can get mentality is not necessarily childish, I live in the country on property that’s pretty wide open… few trees. Views out to 500 yds and further from my front porch are the norm. With cattle come calves, with calves come coyotes. There’s need to be able to see clearly for a pretty good distance. High is a normal setting, Turbo used a large percentage of the time.
Different strokes for different folks.
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Sometimes a diffuser is great, sometimes not. Sometimes a color filter is great, sometimes not. They’re great tools to have in the toolbox, but they’re not always the right tool for the job.
I absolutely agree on whether to use diffusion or not .
Diffuse or not diffuse … that is the question .
Whether it’s nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of artifacts in a beam ……
Truth is everything is light dependent. My point about diffusing a beam to see what is actually what’s really coming out of the emitter. Sometimes just diffusing a beam takes reds / yellows and other colors that are being scattered into the spill and mixing them all up results in a much improved tint . I’m not talking about just softening up … rather blending the colors .
When I’m putting filters over the front of a light trying to decide which minus green filter to use I always bring something like the #3 lighter diffusion to see what the tint looks like without the tint shifting. On some emitters it makes a big difference.
There is no simple answer since every emitter starts in a different part of the spectrum. Even emitters of the same bin can vary fairly dramatically. A few minus green filters can just help you dial in a tint . It could make a perfect tint or it could take an ugly one and make it good enough . It depends on what you started with and … what tints you like or dislike .
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That’s definitely something I’ve been realizing lately. Everyone puts such a huge emphasis on CRI. Why? Up to a certain point who cares? Any color warmer than like 4000k it doesn’t even make sense. Everything is just going to be red. How is that a good indicator of anything? If you Google CRI and half the results are just about how flawed it is and how nobody uses it.
As long as it’s above like 60 I’m good. Honestly I probably couldn’t tell if it was 60 or 80 anyways. Where it falls on that CCT/CIE chart thing is a way bigger deal .
Limolene is a way more powerful solvent than you’d think. It’s an amazing degreaser. I’ve got a whole cabinet of paint thinners and degreasers and solvents in the garage. Half of them probably banned by the EPA years ago. For some things that little spray bottle of Goo-Gone beats all of them. But ya probably anything other than isopropyl would damage the LED. And even then. Id think acetone would work though. If it doesn’t you can make a stronger more concentrated acetone really easily using ordinary household…stuff I probably shouldn’t mention lol. If that doesn’t work then old fashioned brake cleaner with methylene chloride probably would. That’ll definitely destroy the flashlight though.
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I have yet to reconcile, scientifically or with live view, how my Sofirn IF25a’s SST20 4000k LED has a CRI of 95 yet a tint so green.
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Exactly.
High CRI doesn’t necessarily mean white. And despite literally meaning “Color Rendering Index”, it doesn’t actually guarantee good color rendering.
The most reliable metric I’ve found is what @Jeffgoldblum mentioned… where it falls on an ANSI white color chart. Then, assuming a light lands on the right part of that chart, with a good CCT and duv, higher CRI can make it look slightly better than a lower CRI with the same CCT and duv. But if the CCT and/or duv is wrong, no amount of CRI can make it look good.
Even that’s not enough to guarantee a good beam though. There are other ways for a light to fail, like having a rainbow beam. LEDs like XP-G3, XHP70.2, and SST-20 have pretty pronounced rainbow effects… basically, they emit different frequencies at different angles. It’s not usually bad when the LED is bare, but when it’s focused in a torch, a single beam can have several different colors all at once. And that’s a big part of what makes SST-20 look bad. It has a pink spill with a green hotspot, so it looks even more green due to the contrast.
For example, someone on reddit posted this beam shot. IIRC it was a XHP70.2 light or maybe XHP50.2:
And just in case the rainbow wasn’t obvious enough, I ran it through a normalizing filter to max out the brightness of each individual pixel without changing the hue:
This light technically was “white” with a respectable CRI… but that doesn’t mean it looks good.
Anyway, just one example of a light which can’t be fixed by a minus-green filter. It can’t really even be fixed by a DC-Fix style diffuser, though that would at least decrease the rainbow effect somewhat… at the expense of turning it into a flooder, which wasn’t what it was designed to be. To make it really look okay, it would need a semi-translucent white lens cap to fully blend the colors together, effectively turning it into a light bulb.
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I am so happy I didn’t buy that XHP70.2 light I had in my cart today now lol. Had payment info filled in and everything. Backed out just before hitting confirm. Phew. I was going back and forth all day and if I had bought it this post would’ve made me so sad lol
This is my point with good diffusion film. I bought one of the worst xpg-3 emitters ever made … crazy yellow hot spot with another round same size ring around it so it looks like a target the rest of the color hiding in the spill . 4x AA $8.99 oversized side switch Aldi’s grocery store light with a bunch of throw . But man what a crazy ugly hotspot . I made a quick add on diffuser since a spray paint can lid fit it like a glove . Cut a hole in the top , cut up the side to about a half inch and dropped a circle of diffuser film in and shoved the head of the light into it .
Yep It killed all of the throw … just like diffusion is meant to do . BUT the beam ended up lovely . It went from pure trash to amazingly good …all at the cost of a whopping 12 cents .
Once you diffuse a light you can fix almost any tint .
Worst beam I’ve ever seen
- tried to take a pic but the camera won’t show it
It took a while, but I managed to track down the source of that image. It was a Thrunite TC20 with XHP70.2, posted by /u/Graphedmaster, but the post was deleted at some point (at least a few months later) or maybe he was banned, not sure. So the post was hard to find again. The thread title was “Late night service call with my Thrunite TC20. Damn glad I found this sub and got myself a good light.”
In any case, rainbow beams like that are the primary reason why a lot of otherwise-nice LEDs aren’t used much in torches. Like, why XP-G3 and XP-L2 aren’t popular even though they’re quite a bit brighter than the previous generation. They have to be placed behind a heavy-duty diffuser to make an acceptable color, and that mostly eliminates their usefulness in anything with a focused beam, like flashlights.
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That looks soo much like what I see in the Jetbeam light with XHP35 that I got recently.
I have a few XHP 70.2 lights from different brands. None are nearly as bad as the XHP 35.
For anyone unfamiliar with this, it’s probably worth mentioning that this issue only happens on the versions of LEDs with domes, usually called “HD”. The “HI” or “high intensity” models have no dome, and look much better. XHP35 HI, for example, looks pretty nice.
People who don’t mind modding can also slice the dome to improve the beam. That is literally what the “HI” models are, except it’s done at the factory instead of at home.
One model which has gained some notoriety for this is a particular bin of LH351D, with a binning code of “SPHWHTL3DA0GF4RTS6”. It looks pretty good as-is, but is even better when sliced…
… which is how it came to be that flashlight geeks around the world set off on a quest to obtain premium “sliced dogfarts”.
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Omg so that’s where the name comes from lol. I never understood why they were called that
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I Can…. fix a beam which is this far away from white:
(yes, it really does look that green IRL)
wholeheartedly agree if a tint is so bad that a minus green filter doesn’t at least bring it back to something you can at least live with … then it’s time for an emitter swap .
one thing to add [may have been said already]–
green is the color the eye sees best
taking it away, is removing the most ‘lumens per watt’
[it takes about 10 times as much ‘blue power’, to seem equal to the brightness of green]
also the reason the filters melt is that by removing that light, the filter has to get rid of the heat, so it will heat up