Upon analyzing what @QReciprocity42 is talking about, it kind of makes sense to me as such:
Because a reflector essentially does something similar to a lens, it flips the image upside down and left side right…a true inversion of sorts, based loosely on the original characteristics of the emitter…***OR it basically magnifies the original image, blending it witg other portions of the reflected LED, i.e. virtually homogenizing the beam… ***so any inperfections, while blended or refocused, may still be there
Good discussion, but I am not sure the common denomitor is Luminus with uneven phosphor deposit. The colored (not always green) hotspot center is seen in other lights with other LEDs:
Non Luminus LEDs: FFL909MX in Firefly T9R, LHP73B in M21K, CSLNM1 in Lumintop Micro Copper, CSLNM1 in Lumintop GTA. Luminus LEDs IF22a, Wurkkos TS30S, Nitecore, Convoy T8 etc.
What do they have in common? Long throw in a light with smooth reflector and clear TIR. I am suspecting the common denomitor is related to the collimation function or optic (I’ve not seen it with OP reflector), not the LED itself. Of course I am no expert, myself am taking a grain of salt .
I think you’re both correct…if we scraped some of the layer of phosphor while “dedoming” back then, the beam would come out splotchy blue…by that token, if an LED were designed to throw a specific temp of light at a specific angle, then the light collimated from outside that angle would also show up. As far as the hotspot being discolored, between tint shift at high amps, uneven phosphor coatings, and oblique angles, I think we’ve nailed it…screw, meet hammer, hammer wins!
This is exactly the correct intuition. A classical convex lens projects the image of the LED in a one-to-one correspondence: each point on the LED surface corresponds to exactly one point in the projected image, and vice versa. That’s why actual projectors use these lenses and get a sharp rather than blurry image.
On the other hand, a forward parabolic reflector does not follow this correspondence; the image of a point on the LED is no longer another sharp pinpoint, but a vaguely ring-shaped smear. This smearing action smooths out irregularities in a way that has strong circular symmetry.
I agree with you that Luminus is not the only manufacturer to suffer such defects, which have been showing up quite frequently in the past couple of years. I remember first seeing an instance of this in a 219C back in 2021, and nowadays some 519As have it–not as a manufacturing defect, but purely due to different-colored phosphor particles concentrating at different places due to random chance.
The point of an OP reflector is to blur the projected image by introducing random perturbations to reflector geometry, so it should be no surprise at all that smooth reflectors suffer more.
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