Texas Lumens host w/ triple Lumileds Luxeon MZ 5700 90cri leds,ILC-0 RGB illuminated tailcap switch, and LD-B4 drive er. It’s a lot of high cri light in a small package.
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Very cool! I’ve been thinking about a light with three of those LEDs, but with optics/reflectors.
Is it a mule or do you use any kind of optics?
I will send MZ 5700K 90CRI and Z ES 90CRI to Maukka for testing today, already sent Luxeon V. If spectrum/CRI looks good, and if there is interest, I will open interest thread for 5700K 90CRI MZ, rough price estimate should be 6€ per piece (cheaper than mouser+VAT for <50 qty, price for<10 on mouser is 8.5~9€ depending on VAT).
I used a carclo 10508 optics but you can notice a faint donut in the middle but it’s not bad at all.
edit: I realized I used a 10511 optics instead of the 10508. It could explain why the beam still had a donut.
That’ll be a better price than what I paid plus shipping. I got my leds from digikey. In the meanwhile for those of you who are interested in these leds, here’s a review that’s available.
This would be a perfect LED for the BLF Q8, with your Quad board. So a different battery-config as for a XHP50.2 is not needed.
To avoid donut hole, it can be used off centered. Perhaps the reflector-hole have to be widended. I got good results without donut hole in my Skyray King with off-centered 3x XHP50.
Raise the reflector off the LED to reduce/eliminate donut hole. We’re so used to lowering the reflector on a domeless emitter this seems counter-intuitive but it works.
Putting it off-centre is harder to tune properly, but offers better throw.
How about pflexpro’s method of the smooth hybrid reflector? Will that help in reducing the donut hole? I know it gets ugly rings out to make a nice beam on domeless led/smooth reflector combos.
For a Q8 with SMO reflector a Luxeon V with the already in progress new board seems like the obvious choice. I guess if you really want it pulling ridiculous amps and having focusing issues just to be on the bleeding edge of 90CRI output.
If 90CRI is required I think I would rather do those LH351D Samsung LEDs for a bump in output with no board/focusing changes required.
Every emitter I’ve ever seen that wasn’t centered gave a wonky beam profile, can’t see where that would help throw but then I’ve never intentionally skewed one. My OCD wont’ let me, it has to LOOK good first. 
Sometimes I guess it’s just about playing around with new options and seeing what the results might be, out of boredom or curiosity or whatever…
By centring LED on the cross between dies, you get a hole in the middle of the beam and low intensity.
By putting LED higher you’re widening and diffusing the beam, removing the hole, but you still have low intensity.
By centring LED on a single die of a quad emitter, you get as high intensity as if the cross between dies didn’t exist. But then you end up with asymmetric beam. This must be wonky in a single emitter light.
But look at a quarter of Q8 reflector. There are 2 places where it is really low. 2 where it’s high, one large and one small. If you lit up just one LED, you would get a wonky beam too. By having 4 reflectors, you somewhat negate the weirdness. Not fully, the flowery shape is still imperfect, but it’s perfectly usable.
Now the same symmetry effect would help the die centred on a single die. You want the 3 dies directed closer to the outside of the reflector.
This should give a small, but quite hot spot surrounded by very wide and moderately bright main beam. Then quite wonky spill.
This would need a custom MCPCB though, the regular one won’t work.
Or 4 individual MCPCBs.
On my triple, the donut is not that noticeable and where I can faintly notice it, it is on a white wall. The triple frost optics smooths out the beam pretty well. It’s alot better than the triple xhp50 C8 I built a while back. However, when outdoors its puts out a nice floody beam without a noticeable donut. Throw isn’t bad for what it is, but that’s probably due to the sheer lumens output. On another note, the light heats up pretty quickly on high (I have the driver set on 12amp CC).
Going to the x.2 versions where the 4 dies are closer together pretty much negates the need for any of those adjustments and increases throw as well as overall perceived brightness.
Maybe the next mod, at the time I couldn’t find any 90cri xhp50.2. Yes, I tend to favor high cri leds some.
But you can’t do that with Luxeons.
And unmodded MZ offers better throw than even dedomed XHP50.2.
And the MZ will out throw an XHP-35? Or XP-L HI? Or de-domed SST-40?
My C8 that has a modified tube and runs the 20700 cell has an SST-40 in it making 2691 lumens at 9A+ draw at the tail. The MZ is better than this? Haven’t seen an MZ, never saw a Luxeon that looked appealing to be honest.
Luxeon MZ won’t reach the intensity of XHP35 or SST-40.
But it did 2900 lm on Koef3 bench. With CRI 90. And without dome.
On the same setup SST-40 did 2100 lm dedomed. (And little under 2700 domed.)
There are CRI70 variants with higher performance too…
Luxeon MZ is:
- between XHP35 HI and dedomed XHP50.2 in both throw and output
- factory dedomed
- available in 3V-12V
- available in a wide selection of CRI and CT
- not a flip-chip, so avoids the egg yolk
- but with highly separate dies, so we have to fight the hole in the output
This is not a must-have emitter. But worth considering for quite a few uses.
How many amps did it pull to hit that 2900 on the bench? Datasheets make it look pretty puny of course.