Indoors or in a thrower I prefer a 1A or 1C cool. A warm LED just looks like crap indoors IMO and I just can't grow to like it. Outside I prefer a neutral like 3C tint between 4500-5000k. Like FX-32 said, warm emitters remind me too much of old dim incans.
A lot of "warm" tint lights try and replicate the temperature of incan lighting and I find that has way too much red/amber/orange... they all make everything too brown looking at first. Then after a few minutes my brain adjusts and re-centers around that color and it appears perfectly neutral (even though in the back of my mind I know its much warmer than high noon sunlight).
5000K is the perfect color for me. Its a little more pale-white than high noon sunlight, so its not way off... yet still appears very bright on account of the slight cool-ness.
Of all my warmer tint lights (including MAG ROPs and 1185 incans) the only one that continually impresses me with color tint is the Fenix LD25. Its the only one that exact-matches high-noon sunlight. Its a little (very very slight) more yellow than early morning sunlight, but by the time the sun is directly overhead the LD25 is like a small sun in the palm of my hand. I generally am not impressed with color tints... but this one impresses me more than any other. Its a moderately driven XPG so its a nice smooth beam. One of the things I can't stand about the XPG is that its color dramatically green-tint shifts when under driven in low output modes. With the LD25, its color shifts to a warmer yellow/amber (no-green) in the two low lumen modes, so this I think helps it give off a more "pleasing" light at low-lumen close range modes. Overall an outstanding light.
Thanks Jack, though I'm still a bit puzzled. Do Tint and CRI mean different things?
Yes they are different. Tint is a specific color temperature, expressed in Kelvins. CRI is a unitless value on a scale of 1-100, with 100 being the color rendering abilities of high noon sunlight. I am not an expert on the subject however and could not tell you specifically how CRI is measured and quantified.
Wikipedia is your friend though for anything CRI and color temperature related.
The two terms are often confused because manufacturers sometimes use them interchangeably.
Ah.. Thanks kramer5150.
I don't want to highjack this thread, but I think some people and especially beginners confuse CRI attributes with tint attributes. With Cree emitters you normally have to go "warmer" to get better color rendition. More details on (high) CRI here and there are some high CRI Nichias sold here for a reasonable price for those who want to try them.
Then shine an incan . Or the Sun .
You will see that the color spectrums are different .
This can be a looong discussion .
I like white. Pure white. No greenish, bluish, or other ish tint. Just pure white. Neutral or warm white isn't white. I think they are only pleasing to most people because it is familiar.
A few nights ago I looked at a NW(Xeno E03) and CW(Tank E07) beams on a patch of dirt and plants/grass. Because I wanted to really find out if I want NW or CW DQG III AAA. I noticed the NW is really pleasing to my eyes and easier(faster?) to see with. But with the CW I was able to see more small details(contrast?). Color rendition CW gives the real color as what I can see in daylight, the NW makes it yellowish(warmer).
So for me pure white lights, those beams that mimics the sun, are better. But what do I know....
...100 being the color rendering abilities of a black body radiator at a given color temperature. midday sunlight = 100 for CRI, ~6000K for color temp. xenon bulb = 100 for CRI, ~3000K for color temp. both are 100 on CRI, but actual color rendering abilities of sunlight and xenon bulb are very different due to differences in color temp.
say you have a 65 CRI 6000K LED vs 85 CRI 3000K LED; neither will be more natural or accurate strictly speaking. the 3000K emitter has a higher CRI and may be closer to reproducing a 3000K black body radiator than the 6000K emitter is to reproducing a 6000K black body radiator, but if your baseline for accuracy is midday sunlight, then the higher CRI of the 3000K emitter doesn't make it any more accurate because its color temp is way off the baseline.
it really depends on your point of reference, and ultimately, your preference.
just like many others here, for LEDs, which generally have CRI between 65 and 85, i like neutral (4000-5000K) for flood and cool white for throw/output. anything less than 4000K can look super orange and anything above 5000K in a flood can make landscape features kind of hard to immediately recognize. if i want throw, i find that cool white offers higher contrast on landmark type objects and so serves that function better.
If I had to find a small item on a grass field then I'd use a CW as it lets me see more details and also my eyes can focus better.
For general work and biking I prefer NW as it's easier on the eyes and color rendering is the best.
WW for lazy nights when you want to chill and relax. 
I'd go with that.
For throwers, I can see two situations where each tint is probably suited better.
As others have stated CW is probably better in more open areas, (open field, sparse trees) where something that is out of place or has higher contrast is easily identified by the higher beam intensity of the CW. I think this is probably because 75% of what your looking at will have a very tight color range to begin with and its easy to identify the outlier.
In a heavier wooded situation where there is a wider color range and more random placement of saplings, trees bushes, etc, I've discovered the cool white made everything look 2D and around the same color and it was very hard to identify things from a distance. They all kind of blended in. I noticed this phenomenon when at a relatives house and we noticed 2 deer on the property and we were looking for the buck just to be sure he wasn't near us and wouldn't charge. It wasn't until 10-15 seconds later that we noticed there were in fact three other deer because they had blended in so well and hadn't been moving. This was 50-60 yards out
So I think for open areas and high contrast item identification in a thrower, cool white is probably better due to its higher intensity but in a wooded area where there are more variations in color and you're trying to be on the lookout for wildlife the neutral white is my choice.
Oh no, now I have to differentiate between having an openfield thrower and wooded thrower in my collection and shop accordingly
What we need is someone to develop a variable tint LED technology so we can turn a dial on our lights to adjust the tint to our preference whenever we want.
In theory, on the warm side...
In practice not too cool white. I have excellent colour vision (learned the hard way making colour prints for money when that was hard 30 years ago) and can adapt to most things.
In terms of the beams I like, a sort of vanilla ice-cream tint is my personal preference.
In terms of CRI - just use daylight. Seriously - just use daylight.
I can colour match under mercury vapour lights (which are essentially monochromatic) or sodium safelights which are monochromatic but have had an enormous amount of practice and always prefer to use daylight when I can.
I cannot use any light of over 7000K for anything requiring depth perception as I don't have any. HID projectors on my car would be very dangerous as I'd be completely incapable of judging distance.
CRI at that point is irrelevant.
The world essentially looks like a set of cardboard cutouts in blue light.
You're exactly like me, when I think cw though, i think a good solid white! Favorite color hands down.
Cool white is fine but given the choice i would take a neutral as well. I had a Terra Lux Lightstar 80 penlight. It had the high CRI led and it was actually way too warm. It was a sickly yellow/orange color that put me off. I got it because it was supposed to show colors more accuratly but there was so much orange tint, that it made seeing true colors harder than just a cool white would have been. They went too far with the tint on that one.
Don: "I have excellent colour vision (learned the hard way making colour prints for money when that was hard 30 years ago) and can adapt to most things."
Wish I had a quid for every hour I've spent in the darkroom! But I was the exact opposite - lousy colour vision and used to hate colour printing! Became something of a b/w 'expert' by default, and ended up hardly shooting or printing colour at all.
Because of the many months I spent chained to the enlarger (Think wage slave here), I still find B&W pretentious. I can do both and accept that the dynamic range of B&W is way better. And I drank the Ansel Adams Kool-Aid.
I've spent decades in the darkroom - I made my first B&W print 40 years ago. And my first colour print 34 years ago. And have done both for money - at times silly money.
Retouching which I am very bad at - in the days when that involved scalpels on negatives - got paid at 25x the average wage in the 70's. Even when you were very bad at it.
Last did it years before Photoshop appeared.
I have shaky hands - that sort of retouching can be done by anyone with a photo editing program nowadays.
I like neutral. Cool is pretty harsh to my eyes and doesn't give great depth of color outdoors (to my eyes at least). In some cases, warm if even better, especially indoors. When I lost power from a recent storm, I was reaching for my warm Cree XRE over my other, brighter lights simply because it was easier on my eyes.
I was having a chat to Boaz the other day about tints.
He sent me this pic, neutral on the left and cool on the right.
On the left (neutral) has real colours, on the right (cool) has washed out the natural colours.
