I’ve gotten a little… um… “devoted” to high CRI lately. So I bought a spectrometer to help wade through the waters.
I’ve also been dying to see the SST-20’s for myself after reading so much about their awesomeness. So I bought a FW3A.
And WOW. They are divine. They hug the BBL excellent and even on Turbo they are CRI 95+! And I have the data to prove it. Enjoy!
The circles around the dots are a 1-MacAdams Ellipse, so they represent the colors that are indistinguishable from each other. So when the circle touches the BBL, it looks like the BBL.
Personally I only care about the brightest-sustainable and brightest-possible setting on my lights. But I ran the test for you TK. Have a look at the updated OP.
There’s no green issue with mine. If anyone wants to send me their lights to test I would gladly do so for free. I just ask you pay for shipping.
As for heat, mine barely warms up at all unless you go to turbo. On turbo you are right, it heats up VERY quickly.
No green on either of mine. I only use turbo for 5 or 10 seconds at a time, so it’s the same with me — the heat is not an issue. I generally only use the stepped modes and rarely go above mode 5 of 7. Great light, UI and LED as far as I’m concerned. Not quite divine but close.
IMO to many on BLF, an LED being “green” doesn’t really mean “green,” it actually means “insufficiently rosy.” A rosier-than-real-daylight SST-20 being called green really drives that point home.
There’s SKV’s numbers. I have a Ti version 219C at home too and it’s noticably worse than SST-20. I measured it and didnt even post the results. Pretty sure I saw .004 Duv and just stopped measuring.
One question. For your SST-20 FW3A are you using AR lens and Carclo or the all in one Lumintop optic? The stock AR lens can increase the Duv by as much as .0015 - .002 is why I mention it.
Thanks for the link, it gives a great idea how they compare. My offer still stands if anyone wants the full report on theirs.
My FW3A has a 2-piece lens/optic.
I dropped in some of the FD2 SST-20’s and compared it to my original black clipped FW3A with 4000k SST-20’s. As near as I could tell, the very early ones likely had the FD2 binned leds as both my original and modded light have the same visual tint. I do not have a way to measure it, but I am fairly certain this is the case. The tint is really nice as far as not being a 219b R9080 sw45k or sw-40.
It depends on your cell. I suggest you use Samsung 35E or Sanyo NCR18650B. And, to be axtra safe, replace the LED wires with 26AWG wires. On my SW40 D220 and SW45K D200 measure 9.4A max with a fresh cell. As long as you stay below 3.5A per LED and don’t use turbo every second time you turn on the light you should be fine in the long run.
You definitely see a substantial lumen increase on turbo. In the ramp, it’s more than bright enough with a nice tint and CRI. But in my 6A LD-B4 triple, the SW40’s run really well on high mode…
