Makita light - what LEDs

I just used this flashlight today:

Would anybody know what LEDs it uses? I found the tint visually quite nice and it seems to have decent colour redention/CRI.

I cannot find any good images of the LEDs, at least on first try. :confused:

Looks like something older from Cree or so. But I could be totally wrong. Are there some good images around?

Do you have a picture of them?

Not sure if good enough.



For flood it like something in 2835 plastic packaging, similar to Nichia Optisolis or Bridgelux emitters.

The throw LED could be a XP-L HI (2nd gen?) - is not clearly visible unfortunately.

Hmm could be a lot of things. I was gonna say Nichia optisolis as well, like a Nichia 757. Sounds like I’m just parroting koef here lol but I hadn’t read his post yet. Makita is a Japanese company, they could be using Nichias. But they could be using anything, and there’s tons of emitters that look like those.

And ya, I also thought the center one looks cree-like.

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Looks a lot like an xhp50.3 hi but I think it’s too small. Can’t tell, is there 1 die there or 4? Like, is there a cross in the middle?

What works best for me when I’m taking photos of LEDs is to put the phone in video mode with the flash on, then I grab the picture from a screenshot of the video.

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Depends heavily if the phone has some sort of macro mode. Wihout this it is almost impossible to get good close-up pictures. Also good lighting is absolutely important here.

The LED looks like a XP-L HI of 2nd gen or something. It would fit for markings and ESD device. For XHP35 HI the LES is too small, for XHP50.3 HI the whole package looks too small. Pretty sure this is a 3535 LED.

Maybe something from Nichia? But the 219C-V2 (domeless) and 719A are also too small LES-wise, also the ESD device is not visible on these.

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Oh it won’t be a good close-up picture lol. My photos definitely are not good. Only so much you can do with a crappy phone camera. Just throwing suggestions out there. Any improvement is still an improvement

Definitely agree with all of that. I thought it looked like a 4 die… but maybe Ive just been looking at too many 50.3’s lately, because its way too blurry to make that out. If there’s no cross its a dead ringer for the 2nd gen xpl hi.

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Next time I visit the friends who have the light, I’ll do the proper macro shot of it. I got interested because a friend who owns the light has Makita everything and is mighty proud of it :-). He is famous for liking things that are the biggest and the greatest and I have a penchant for tiny gadgets that are good enough. So I was joking that ‘it’s not the size’ etc.

I went for a night walk with his teenage son and I had my little Nitecore NU25(2017) headlamp, which uses crappy CRI Cree XP-G2 S3 for the main light and some unknown semi-decent CRI LED (don’t know what it is but it must have higher R9 as the BBQ steaks look much less morbid with it, for example) for the second diffused emitter.

All differences aside, I expected the Makita to be pretty mighty and throwy (even if way too big), but the quality of light surprised me. It definitely, unlike my HP-G2 and similarly to my tiny ‘high CRI’ LED, rendered reds well.

I guess it makes sense as the Makita is designed for home improvement kind of use, like painting, and it may be useful to show the colours similarly to how they may look in the daylight, adaptation notwithstanding.

If the main emitter in Makita is indeed one of the suggested ones (like XP-L HI for instance), does it jive up with my impressions re. color rendering?

p.s. The tints and ‘feel’ of the spot emitter and the flood ones were quite similar too.

The XP-L HI 2nd gen is available in high CRI (90 CRI lower as 3000 K, min. 80 lower as 4000 K, above only typ. 75 CRI is available), if Makita ordered some nice tint/color groups the light quality could be somewhat good.

But in the end only really sharp and good macro images and at least a quick Opple reading could give more clear information.

That such a light has high CRI, at least for floody LEDs, makes sense since some work in home improvement requires good color rendition (paintings, electrical works etc)

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