Changing the thermal ceiling to 65 C helps, but gives diminishing returns. You can eeke out a bit longer high brightness before it throttles and maintain higher brightness, but it becomes unusable after 4 or 5 minutes due to heating. Plus the battery life is reduced. I leave it at 60 C for smaller single cell lights.
I have my ts30s pro set to 60 degrees Celsius.
I think that is the limit to be able to handle the flashlight with bare hands and it does give off a lot of heat
It bothered me enough to already sell my T9R 909MX.
I asked Ivy about it, she said that itâs normal in T9R and that even E90 has slightly visible dark spot while white wall hunting at close distance, but due to TIR optics itâs not visible outside.
Supposedly it shouldnât be visible outside in T9R too, but in my unit the hole was visible even at 200-300m.
Yes I understand, that hotspot pattern of white rim around green center bothered owners of Wurkkos TS30S Pro also. The white rim is extremely distinct/annoying, and generated a lot of discussion at time of TS30S Pro introduction, eventually even âdragging inâ @Toykeeperâs participation in this post here .
As seen in the picture above, Iâve actually measured the brightness and found that the green center looks dark because itâs colored, but actually measured a little brighter. To this day I donât know why so many SBT90.2 lights have this pattern. Wonder if @QReciprocity42 has any idea.
2 lights that should not have it or has it to a lesser degree: TS30S original, non-Pro as seen in picture below, and I think the E90 because it has TIR optics, that @Sirstinky should be reviewing soon. Neither of these 2 lights will come close to the 1300m throw of T9R though.
Same with T9R; it wonât survive any white-wall beam check. A lot of rings outside the hotspot. The beam becomes good/acceptable only with real life use at further distance like 20 yards and beyond, where nearly all rings will have faded. If I were Firefly I would probably prefer to send you E90 for reviewing also.
Latest news from Firefly is that T9R will become available, again, in March. Whether itâs same old or version 2 with better button and USB cover they wouldnât tell me. And LEDs such as SBT90.2 and the new 909 4500k will be available. E90 looks so nice but I probably will go for T9R again for the throw and the nice bright spill. Difficult decision.
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At what distance did you perform the measurement? The distance shown in your previous photograph is too short for reliable measurementsâeven a slight variation of a cm away could result in massive intensity differences.
Good point, but no, that close distance is only for beamshot picture. For output measurements Opple sensor is 5 meters away on a shelf, the light is on tripod. Then I could sweep the light horizontally so either green center or white rim is on sensor. The white rim at this distance is twice the diameter of Opple sensor, so for sure thatâs all that the sensor sees.
I just repeated test again in dark home-theater room, this time with T9R. Green center is unequivocally always brighter than white rim.
Thank you for the clarification! My best guess isnât new to you: Mach banding. The rim of the hotspot, being closer to the dimmer corona, may appear brighter than the center despite being actually dimmer.
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This kind of puzzle is what makes this hobby so much fun. At the time of our discussion of this topic a couple years ago, I actually cropped the TS30S Proâs beamshot so as to make sure I was not âseeing thingsâ, an illusion. To at least make sure they are 2 different colors!
It is possible that there is a real difference in color, but I would not trust a photograph to pick it up. Examine the following beamshot (one on the right), which appears to contain a very yellow (or peach, if you look to the left!) center surrounded by bands of blue and other colors, finishing with a green-brown boundary at the edge of the spill. To my eyes, the beam is completely uniform in tint. This indicates that a cameraâs tint perception is not consistent, and may be altered by independent factors such as intensity.
Sure. But how do we rule out your/our eyes being the weak link, not being to pick up the differences that the camera captured? Set on auto-exposure, the camera freeze framed the beam with decreased intensity, resulting in the picture that we now look at.
Mach band is a phenomenon created entirely by our eyes and brain, but captured by camera faithfully. Thatâs a different topic, but still showing the weak link is us.
It is entirely possible that our eyes donât pick up certain features that are not captured by the camera, but in many situations differences/inconsistencies can be proven to be attributable to the camera. Such examples include:
(i) two beamshots, taken of the same beam at different exposure levels, can show different tints and tint variations across the beam. Since we know for a fact that the spectrum of the light remains identical, we can infer that the camera is a weak link.
(ii) Conflicting perceptions on features of the same type. My camera fails to pick up tint shifts even when it is obvious to the eye. Thus, when my eyes do not pick up tint shift, but the cameraâs image exhibits tint shift, one cannot attribute it to the camera having generally greater sensitivity; unintentional artifacting by the camera is a simpler and more consistent explanation.
(iii) While absolute tint is hard for the human eye to pin down, relative tint, i.e., how a light is tinted compared to a reference source side-by-side, is fairly precise and consistent. I check for tint shift by matching to a second (reference source), and changing the part of the beam to see if the color changes relative to the reference.
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Modern-day cameras are digital, not analog devices. Information is not presented to the viewer âas-isâ in some continuous or unadulterated manner, but turned into strings of 1âs and 0âs and processed in many complicated ways before reaching your eyes as lit pixels, by which point the color has already changed: most spectrums/colors we see with the eye cannot be reproduced by pixels due to their monochrome RGB construction. Aside from color, cameras have much lower dynamic range for intensity compared to the human eye, which is not surprising because the range of intensities perceivable and distinguishable by the human eye span many more orders of magnitude compared to the range (or even just the number) of intensities that a screen can display.
JPEG could display up to 16 millions colors, more than our eyes could distinguish. I still think top 2 candidates:
- Our eyes and brain (same beamshot of 519a looks ok by itself, but green next to 219b). Subjective perceptions of all 5 senses are easily fooled. Thatâs why we measure lumen output, throw, Duv, and not use our eyes to judge which light is brighter, etc. What you described you saw, I may not see the same thing.
- Your camera and camera settings.
16 million colors in RGB is like 16 million shades of grey: it sounds like a lot, but your display canât even distinguish purple (red+blue) from violet (monochromatic), something my eyes can do trivially.
There is little evidence that phone cameras arenât fooled even more easily compared to the human eyeâautomatic settings yield the exact same result comparing 519A and 219B. The claim that âSubjective perceptions of all 5 senses are easily fooledâ is not quantifiable for the purpose of comparison, and does not address the issue at hand: that cameras may be erroneous and inconsistent in color and intensity perception, and in many ways worse than the human eye.
A photograph does not constitute a measurement. Plus, all photographs are judged by eye. Therefore, viewing a photograph introduces 2 sources of perceptive error: the camera and the eye, while a direct look at the beam only introduces one source of error.
So cameras arenât so objective after all, if many features of the photograph depend on the camera used and the settings used. That raises the question: what is the right camera and right settings to use, and what is the definition of ârightâ?
Going into cameraâs WB settings and photography will be way way off topic. Let me get back to the original post one last time. We were shown
A. a picture,
B. what you saw (subjective & known to be extremely error prone among us hobbyists)
C. CONCLUSION (!): A is âwrongâ because it doesnât agree with B.
I hope we both agree the supporting evidence is severely lacking. This is an extremely complex point you are trying to prove and the argument is too simplistic (at the least, present an article). I trust you, and definitely your great knowledge, but not your eyes.
Besides camera settings, there are also issues of whether your monitor is calibrated, etc. A LOT has to be presented to say photographyâs tint capture is âwrongâ! I would check to see if thereâs an article supporting this as the first step.
I claim that this is an over-simplified representation of my argument. A few points of oversimplification:
(A) A picture is also âsubjective & known to be extremely error prone among us hobbyistsâ, which was not mentioned
(B) You are correct in that I presented âwhat I sawâ, but it would be ridiculous to dismiss something as inaccurate just because it was seen by the human eyeâafter all, even digital images are seen via the human eye! Furthermore, I presented not just a subjective description but plenty of relevant examples where the camera is self-inconsistent (tint varying over different exposure levels), poorly perceptive (known AND visible tint shift not picked up by camera), and generates nonexistent artifacts (blue rings and green-brown edge in 519A beam).
(C) This is not representative of my reasoning because I did not claim that anything is âwrongâ. I simply pointed out inconsistencies and camera perceptions that do not agree with basic reasoning.
It is true that human perception is not perfect, but it does not follow that nothing we see can be trusted.
My point is that âcameras may be erroneous and inconsistent in color and intensity perception, and in many ways worse than the human eyeâ. I have given examples of all of the above, with the last justified by camera not picking up known and visible tint shift, and not distinguishing between certain colors like purple and violet.
It would be nice to have an article that answers every question, but sadly that often does not hold. This is why research is done. The logical validity of an argument is independent of its expositor. For example, it does not take an article to justify that a camera cannot distinguish between purple and violet, and that cameras can fail to pick up tint shift that is well-known and measured within the flashlight community.
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One humanâs eyes. Dismissing only if you use it to make a wide ranging conclusion.
This is a fair pointâI assumed that my vision is fairly typical, which could be false, and I relied on the probability of this happening being reasonably low.
On a related note, there seems to be some consensus on how the camera picks up on tint very differently depending on whether the emitted photographed is high or low CRI. Looking up some discussions now.
OMG no more please. Youâre too young and too smart for me. I need to have dinner and go to sleep. 
Do thank you for taking time to answer.