Made a little comparison between a Convoy L21A and Z1, both running the SFT-25R emitter. Both set to 100%, video is sped up 15x.
Was mostly curious to see how the Z1 with its two-part zoomie design heats up compared to a solid one-piece body. And yeah, pretty much as expected you can see the slidable front section of the Z1 is noticeably heating up slower than the rest. Though I’ll admit it’s a bit unfair comparing it to the L21A, which has a lot more thermal mass to work with.
Got more thermal videos of other lights lined up, will post the here too.
Also interested in seeing how much difference the shelf makes!
On an unrelated note, I am a bit unsure about the interpretability of maximum temperature as thermal performance. Intuitively, better performance is associated with higher thermal conductivity, which makes a light heat up faster and reach a higher temperature quickly. However, smaller lights (which have worse thermals) also heat up fast.
The ideal test would be to measure the temperature near the LED, with lower temperature indicating better thermals, but it might be difficult using a thermal camera rather than a thermocouple.
Yes, you are right. Whether the lamp is heating up or not does not necessarily reflect its performance. I think it would be ideal if I could overlay, at least, the relative light output to represent and make thermal throttling visible, but I am not yet sure how to do that.