After trying this new mod at night, I think I’ve ranked my best-tint lights according to how well they render color, from best to worst:
BST-wide (and soon, probably a SRK-wide… edit: my SRK-wide ended up very slightly yellow, great overall but not as nice as the BST-wide)
L3 L10-219 or Convoy S7-219B (different color temperatures but both fantastic)
HD2011-219B
Thrunite T10T NW (edit: after looking more closely, I no longer put this on par with the HD2011-219B; I simply picked test subjects which happened to be compatible with the tint)
Zebralight H52Fw / CNQG Brass Beauty XP-G2 3B / JETBeam RRT01 early-2013 model (last XM-L model; XM-L2 ones seem to use a much colder tint)
Everything else I have does mediocre (or worse) color rendering, but all of the above are good. It was a big surprise to see the T10T NW fared so well… there’s definitely a gap between it and the two Nichia 219 lights above it, but it seems to be on par with the Nichia 219B light I put together today. It’s a step above any other individual Cree tint I’ve tried. And I’m surprised that the two 219Bs I’m using didn’t end up on the same tier, since they should be the exact same emitter.
Anyway, the Nichia 219 seems to deliver the best tint I’ve found in a single emitter. But multiple combined emitters spread through the ansi white spectrum seems to work even better, and I’m really liking wide-spectrum lights lately.
Oh, and I’m not sure how much tint lottery there is on the T10/T10S/T10T series. The product page on amazon specifies “NW” as “3500K to 5000K” and I think mine is right at 5000K. The “CW” models are listed as “5000K to 8000K”. So, YMMV.
You would have more success using this type of mod to get the light tailstanding, you might need to sand the retaining rings down a bit and maybe remove the spring from the driver board so you just have a solder blob in it’s place to fit longer cells as this mod shortens the battery tube.
Thanks! That worked pretty well. It took a few tries to find a suitable O-ring or gasket, but eventually I found a good one and it can finally tail-stand.
This was also a good excuse to add the missing O-rings and lube up everything which needed lubing.
Can you please post some beamshots? I also want to mod some cheap flashlights and am curious about the improvement in color rendering between a Nichia and a basic xml. Also how good is the heatsinking, can you run the flashlight at max for extended periods?
There are a bunch of Nichia vs Cree beamshots around. It can be hard sometimes to really show high CRI color rendering differences with pictures since it adds the camera sensor & your LCD screen in the mix.
There's a reason why there's so few comparison pictures around, Helios was mild about it: it is impossible to do justice to what you see in real with pictures and computer screens. I myself really tried, and although some of the difference is captured, it does not even come close. In pictures you do not see any difference between a 70 cri 4C tint and a 92cri sw45 tint, in real it is instantly clear.
It is very difficult to get good pictures of CRI differences. I have a pretty inexpensive camera and, although I did try a while back, the results really don’t look much like they do in person. I mean, high-CRI lights look good in pictures… but so do low-CRI lights. In person, it’s a very different story.
It’s also somewhat difficult to capture useful beam shots to show the brightness variation throughout a beam, especially on diffused lights. Doing that properly requires a high-dynamic-range photo setup, and ideally a monitor with more than 8 bits per color channel. I try to use a multi-exposure approach instead, showing one underexposed image, one overexposed, and one in-between. It works, I guess, but it still doesn’t really convey the true appearance very well.
In any case, the beam fades smoothly in brightness from the center all the way to the edge, and it’s about 170 degrees wide. The slope of the brightness curve varies throughout that range, but it’s very smooth with no sharp or sudden changes in the drop-off rate.
Without diffuser film, the beam is fairly traditional — spot, corona, spill, and outer drop-off, all in four distinct segments.
I haven’t tried to leave the light on high for very long, but I’m kind of a wuss about using the maximum modes on any light. I treat the highest mode as a turbo on every light, and I try to keep the temperature quite a bit lower than strictly necessary. In any case, I doubt the light would have any heat issues at only 1.5A on maximum.
Thank you very much for the response. In your opinion, is a Nichia 219 setup on a budget light worth the cost/labour, or is it all hype? It just so happens that I do have a 10 bit panel, being a photo amateur.
Yes, it makes a big difference to my eyes. It’s a difference between having a tint or just being… white.
I have two 219A lights, two 219B lights, and two wide-spectrum lights. Plus a variety of single Cree tints. Oh, and a D25A 219, but that one doesn’t count since EagleTac kinda botched it.
Every high-CRI or wide-spectrum light I have looks quite noticeably better to me than all of the single-Cree-tint lights. Some of the neutral-white Crees with a pinkish hue look pretty good to me, but they’re still a step below the first six lights I mentioned.
The 219Bs do look different than the 219As though. They seem to be about 5000K instead of 4500K, even though they’re both spec’d at 4500K. But both are very nice, and very white when no other lights are on.
About the wide-spectrum lights… on one I kind of missed where I was aiming and it ended up a little warmer than intended (very slightly yellow), but the other one was spot-on and it renders colors more vividly than the sun. But despite having such vivid color rendering, when I compare beamshot pictures of a colorful subject to a 65-CRI cool white Cree XM-L 1A, the pictures look almost the same.
However, if you don’t care much about vivid colors, you’re probably better off with a regular Cree emitter. It’s brighter and more efficient and the XM-L2 / XP-G2 product lines handle heat better.
The easiest way I’m aware of to try a high-CRI light is to grab a L3 Illumination L10-219. It’s the least-expensive high-CRI light on the market. Shipping from the US can be pretty expensive though, so you could also just build a light like what I did in this thread. It may be difficult to find a verified-good source of the correct bin of Nichia 219 emitters though.
That’s a very personal, subjective sort of thing. I personally find the high-CRI lights worthwhile, and after trying one I’m very reluctant to get anything else. But it doesn’t matter to everyone. Lots of people have tried it and don’t care.
For most practical purposes, tint doesn’t really matter. If it emits photons, it can keep you from tripping over things in the dark. But if you care about the quality of light rather than just the quantity/intensity of light, it’s probably worth at least trying.
Really, I probably could have gotten by with one L3 L10-219 and one nice headlamp and nothing else. But I enjoy this hobby, and have expanded to a much more diverse collection. I didn’t mod the HD2011 because I needed it or to save money, I just wanted to do it for its own sake. And because I decided, as long as this is for my own entertainment instead of practical purposes, I should stop buying new lights and learn how to improve old lights instead.
I like my Convoy S7-219B better, but it’s stainless steel so it’s heavy and doesn’t handle heat as well. I think the 1.4A I gave it is probably safe, but I still try not to use it on high for very long, and I even limit my use of medium unless I’m using it as a handlebar light on my bike (lots of air flow).
This is probably just me being way too careful. Both lights have the emitters reflowed onto copper and then thermal-pasted to a decent pill designed for higher current, so I probably couldn’t heat-damage it unless I wrapped it in a thick blanket or something.
Others around here run similar hosts (S2, S3) at three times as much power without issues (4.5A), and run smaller hosts (RMM’s 16340 EDC) on more power just fine too (2.1A).
Oh, er, BTW… Convoy hosts are often fairly cheap. I think the S2 host is only about $9 at fasttech, and it’s a much better host than the HD2011. The main thing to watch out for is I think it may have a significantly deeper reflector and you might need to keep your wires and solder beads pretty thin to get the reflector to seat properly. (not sure if the S2 host uses the deep Convoy reflector or the shallow one, but my S7 uses the deep one and it was a little awkward)
This light still works well and is still in use. Not frequently, since I have a ton of other lights which are generally better… but at least sometimes.
I gave it new firmware way back in 2015… the “s7” firmware in my repository. So now it has my favorite fancy modes. It’s one of several similar lights I have, with a clicky switch, a 219B emitter, and a nanjg-style driver (single channel w/ 7135 chips and attiny13) with my firmware installed. It starts at the lowest mode and goes up on each half-press, then goes into various blinky modes like battcheck and strobes. Hold the button for a second though, and it’s back to the beginning of the sequence at moon. It’s simple, but good.
I find it neat how such a cheap host, with a new LED and firmware, can become a nice enough item to keep and use long-term. I mean, sure, it’s basically just a cheap metal tube that I put some nicer stuff inside… but still.
Most of the time though, I use Hanklights with Anduril. I particularly like the KR4 with 219B sw45k, and the D1 (or KR1) with W1 emitter and 18350 tube. Together, they cover virtually all general-purpose and distance lighting tasks. The HD2011 I modded in this thread mostly just stays in the closet to make it easier to pick out clothes in the dark.
This is the stuff that keeps me at BLF, I don’t care for the mindless purchasing for the sake of it, unboxing videos, showy-offy, buying latest and greatest for it to sit on a shelf mentality…
Glad the light is still ticking, I guess there are more efficient 219b bins available nowadays, but probably more effort to reflow the LED than it’s worth.
The light is still pretty much the same now as it was then. The DC-Fix hasn’t changed; it just sticks to the glass and makes the beam more smooth, as always.
The 219B in it is old, but TBH, after searching for like a decade for something better, 219B is still my favorite type of LED. Nothing I’ve tried since then has produced a better-looking beam.
Maybe a dedomed 519A could be good too, but I haven’t tried one of those yet. It’s the only LED right now which looks like it might have the potential to compete with 219B.
