Not offhand, but it’s still gotta be here.
@Lightbringer
Have not found that particular Dr. Jones thread yet ,but this one certainly relates relates to the OP’s question.
Ok few minutes later I found this , is this the Dr.Jones thread you are referring to?
Minor correction: a bigger reflector does not imply more light is collected: in fact, a large and shallow reflector collects less light than a small but deep reflector. What a bigger reflector does well is converting rays from a point source to near-parallel rays, the larger the reflector the closer to being parallel the rays are.
A really nice way to think about intensity is to imagine standing at the receiving end of the beam. What you see is a reflector filled with the image of the LED. Fixing the output constant, either an increase in reflector size or a decrease in emitter size results in the reflector making more "copies" of the LED, resulting in your receiving more light.
As Hoop said, the opening and depth of the reflector determine the angle of the spill. Secondly, the spill luminance is reduced as the emitter gets smaller.
Manufacturers have chosen this setup in the past. It’s very common in ‘tactical’ lights like Armyteks Dobermann (XHP35).
Yep sorry for that, that is the one I meant to plug in the there second time “a few minutes later”
Very interesting and informative thanks!
I do recall one member here modded their BLF GT with an Osram CULNM1 and I wasn’t very impressed with the range.
Here’s another mod with the BLF GT for 3,700m
The key to throw is focal distance from LED to optic.
A large optic has a larger distance to the LED.
So with a very deep reflector with a relatively small diameter, the distance between the LED and the reflector is still relatively small.
Yes, with a very deep reflector the distance from the LED to the widest part is relatively large, but extra depth only adds a little bit to how much light is reflected.
This is not worthwhile beyond 1:1 proportions of depth and width.
In fact, most LED flashlight reflectors are approximately 4 wide and 3 deep (like 40mm wide and 30mm deep or 60mm wide and 45mm deep) and even less deep reflectors can be found in throwers.
Extreme reflector depth mostly makes the head taller and more expensive and heavier.
One benefit can be that the spill is as narrow as the corona, eliminating much of the rainbow effect.
And in all more light is cast into a similar direction.
But if you want a tight piercing hotspot you need width rather than depth, and the spill will be more useful because it will be wider.
A 250mm diameter reflector and a 25mm diameter reflector may have the exact same focal length. These two reflectors will have the same parabolic geometry, except in regard to where the parabola terminates, i.e. where it is cut off. The focal length of a parabola is the distance between the vertex and the focus point.
A reflector with a short focal length may have the same linear distance from the emitter surface (focal point) to the clear aperture as a larger diameter reflector with a longer focal length. Example
Not quite! The spill intensity depends almost solely on the total output of the emitter, independent from emitter size and reflector size.
As was previously pointed out, depth does not really matter for throw, what matters is width. However, deeper reflectors do tend to blend the tint nicely, while shallow reflectors tend to produce a fried-egg beam, Thrunite T2 being a particularly egregious example.
I agree to this statement, for this simple non-scientific reason:
I remember those rechargeable flashlights that has even lead-acid type battery power source at the bottom and a separate, very wide reflector yet very shallow with halogen bulb and a grab handle on top, sold usually in hardware stores. Commercial LED flashlights were not even available at that time yet.
I marvel how far they cleanly throw a piercing light to a distance.
If you take two reflectors of the same diameter, and one is taller than the other, (it has a shorter focal length) the taller one will produce higher lux on target, all other components being the same. The taller reflector has more surface area and also collects more light because the spill angle is reduced, which is to say the spill is being collimated into the beam. This also means that the taller reflector will throw as much as a slightly diametrically larger but shorter reflector. For a practical example: the S2 reflector, despite having a ~1.5mm smaller clear aperture than the S21A reflector, produced ~4% more lux on target in my recent tests at 1.3 meters.
Here’s an interesting situation:
The following optical configurations result in the same diameter and also the same amount of parabolic surface area:
That’s an array of seven particularly tall reflectors (this one from KD) vs 1 large reflector of the same overall diameter and with a focal length such that the total surface area of the parabola comes out the same.
The emitters used could be like so:
7 x Osram WF1 (~7mm sq) at 800 lumens each = 5600 emitter lumens
1x SBT90.2 (9mm sq) at 5600 emitter lumens
So these configurations have the same lumens output, the same diameter, and the same optical surface area.
The WF1 setup has higher emitter surface intensity.
Which one will put more lux on target? 
[quote=Hoop]
ah
so it IS the girth after all!
Yes, but geometry and focal distance for a reflector are not the same thing.
Same geometry but very shallow reflector doesn’t have the distant part a deeper one does have.
With an aspheric lens you measure the focal distance between the LED and the flat side of the lens, but not with a reflector, of course.
And something that hasn’t been mentioned yet, is that hotwire bulbs throw light to the sides and even behind the emitting source (ie filament), whereas LEDs barely get 150° or so. Not even 180°, and certainly not 270° or more, like bulbs do.
So a wide shallow reflector might still throw a great beam for a bulb, but most of the light coming out of an LED misses it completely.
That’s true.
For an LED you can cut off the bottom part of an incandescent reflector, leaving you with an even shallower reflector.
I’ve done some experimenting with an aspheric to take over where the reflector comes to an end, but the obvious challenge is to mount the lens in the centre with the proper focal distance.
But your point about 150° or so is interesting too.
Because the light at those extreme (for an LED) angles is warmer and greener, giving us that lovely puke color corona we’re all so very fond of.
I have eliminated much of that vomit ring of light by using centring gaskets that protrude so that it shrouds that greenish light.
I also put a layer of white out on the inside of the centring gasket so that it is refected diffusely and it becomes part of the spill, which then will be slightly less cool.
Works pretty well, allthough in real life use a corona is also useful sometimes.
In a thread such as this, vague statements are rather harmful to an overall understanding. So too is the use of improper terminology.
Taken literally, which is all we can do, this implies that a “mule” (no optic) would throw very far as long as the emitters have high surface intensity. Or taken another way, it would mean that regardless of the flux output of such a mule, the one with higher surface intensity emitters would throw further. So you could have two mules, one with 10x SBT90.2 emitters putting out 20,000 lumens at very low surface intensity, and the other with a single WF1 cranked to the max putting out 1,000 lumens, and the statement suggests that the WF1 is going to put more lux on target because it has a much higher surface intensity.
Will this in fact be the result? i.e. is it true?
If not, does it become true if you add identical optics to both of those emitter arrangements? (10 large optics to the SBT90.2 array and one of the same optics to the WF1) Now will the WF1 put more lux on target?
What if an SBT90.2 and a WF1 were operating at the same surface brightness and behind the same optic. Do they put the same amount of lux on target despite the SBT90.2 having 6x more flux? The above quote says yes, they put the same amount of lux on target.
But are you certain?
This is an interesting discussion I would love to go more in-depth with:
The latter claim I think is true, but I believe by "into the beam" you mean, more precisely, "into the corona", where the corona is defined as the region that receives emission from both the bare LED and a partial reflection from the reflector.
That's a very interesting, albeit somewhat unexpected observation. I could not think of an explanation for why the smaller aperture reflector produces a more intense beam, other than that the LED's angular distribution deviates enough from the Lambertian (proportional to perceived area) to make a difference, as reflectors of different shapes (up to scaling) capture different parts of the angular distribution. Here's a problem for us to think about: fix the same LED at the same output. If we elongate the reflector indefinitely while preserving its diameter, what happens to the intensity of the beam? Does it diverge to infinity or converge to a finite constant?
On a second thought, perhaps deviation from the Lambertian is expected, since sideways emission has to pass through more phosphor and get an additional intensity reduction. This modifies the Lambertian distribution by pulling mass from the tails toward the center, which explains why deeper reflectors are more intense: a greater proportion of their captured light is close to direct frontal emission, which is more intense than sideways emission.
I love this! I assume that "optical surface area" refers to the area of the annulus shape seen by the target, not the literal surface area of the paraboloid. I believe the 7xWF1 config will out-throw the SBT, and here's my reasoning, which I hope is a decent first-order approximation.
First, remove the reflectors. From the perspective of the target, both lights have equal output and (presumably) equal angular distribution, so they have the same intensity. Now put the reflectors back in, say they both have apparent area A mm^2 as seen by target. For the 7xWF1 setup, the reflectors magnify the emitters by a factor of A/7, while the factor is A/9 for the SBT, which is less than A/7. Thus, the target perceives greater intensity from the 7xWF1.
Yes, it’s about the frontal surface area of the parabola.
That thread is really interesting 