I’ve read the threads on the breakthrough of using gasoline/petrol (or even other things such as Coleman fuel, diesel, and acetone) to greatly ease de-doming.
I think what surprised most or all of us, is at least Cree LEDs de-domed in this manner, became WARMER in tint, not cooler. And not just a little warmer (texaspyro was seeing a drop of around 2000 Kelvin; see XML and XML2 de-dome color temperature changes ).
What I haven’t seen (or I missed) is a reliable explanation as to WHY this is happening.
In the past, de-doming seemingly typically involved damaging/removing some of the phosphor. Phosphor changes the LED’s innately ultraviolet or violet light, to the visible spectrum.
My guess (and only a guess) is de-doming via gasoline is so effective at leaving he phosphor intact, we’re seeing that perhaps the dome itself kind of ‘re-cools’ the light after the phosphor does its job? But that seems incredible, seeing as how clear (and small) those little drops of silicone are. And considering how difficult full-spectrum white, especially warm white LEDs have been to develop, I doubt Cree would then add a substance to the LED which made it significantly cooler.
My previous understanding was that to make the LED warmer, more phosphor would need to be added. But that’s obviously not happening here.
The irony is that a lot of older low-end, overly cool LEDs in our collection could potentially end up getting an actually really nice neutral-ish or warm-ish tint (if you like that kind of thing), which people used to pay extra for.
So has it been determined why this is happening? And is this phenomenon restricted to Cree?
(As a caution, just in case anyone missed the gasoline breakthrough, good results seem reported with most modern Cree models, but not XR-E and MT-G2, for different reasons.)