What is your favorite LED color temperature, and why?
I just got a convoy M21B in with the Nichia B35AM in 2700K and I’m not sure how to feel about it. I wanted to try a warmer LED, but I think this one might be too warm for my tastes. Maybe it would be enjoyable at night on a camping trip, when compared next to a campfire (right now it just makes everything look like it’s on fire). But it got me thinking about what the pros and cons might be at each color temperature level. I think my favorite overall right now is about 4000k, but lately I’ve been using a Convoy with a 519A in 5700K as my work flashlight, and I like that color temp better during the middle of the day. It feels more neutral, which is exactly what I want when looking into a box of electrical wires.
Depends. Daytime, cooler, up to 5000K-5500K or so, is okay.
All-around, 4000K-4500K is quite nice.
Nighttime, well after dark and outside (ie, not tainted by indoor lighting), down to 2700K is easy on the eyes and doesn’t attract nearly as many bugs.
Eyes adjust after a while, so once you’re “used to” 2700K after a while, it just looks natural.
Any time, day or night, 6500K and up is just garish and harsh.
This is probably way too much detail, but here’s a graph of the color temperatures and tints I like:
It’s an ANSI White chart with the blackbody line dotted from where it says “BBL”. The area I like is circled and highlighted in white, with a thumbs-up at my favorite part of the spectrum.
The thick pink line shows the tint-ramping range of one of my nicest-looking lights, a 2-channel model with CCT ramping. It’s a D4Sv2 XP-L HI which ramps from 1A to 8A. It looks great, and it makes almost everything else look green in comparison. The color space is curved, but mix two different LEDs and the resulting blend follows a straight line… which means the middle tints tend to look far more pink than most LEDs.
Anyway, the ideal pink-to-green tint depends on the blue-to-yellow color temperature. Different tints look better at different temperatures.
Interestingly there are studies that correlate colour temperature brightness with CCT. I forget if it’s cooler or warmer for throwers Vs flooders though…
Some flashaholics have a personal attachments to CCTs and DUV, I also feel that I would be that way.
But I guess at some point the general population has no such attachments and even if a low CCT has the same brightness as a higher CCTs the impression is that the higher CCT is brighter so you might look out of place for someone who doesn’t care too much about details just use something that appears valuable for everyone and forget about it.
But yeah I see the point of which LED one would prefer in daylight, I have also found myself using flashlights in partially naturally lit places to work on details in the shadowed areas and then I do feel like something that matches more with daylight and appears neutral would be nicest thing to use. Not that is necessary to have something to kind of match but it’s kind of nice.
fwiw, sunlight has positive DUV and tends to be about 5500K, so it makes sense that when your eyes are adapted to sunlight, a flashlight of similar color temperature and tint will look “neutral”, or similar to the ambient light your brain is adapted to at the time.
Also completely agree!
When our brain is adapted to an ambient light that is warm, we are likely to enjoy a flashlight whose color and tint is similar to the ambient light we are adapted to, at the time.
I would neither use 2700K during the day, nor 5700K when dark adapted.
bottom line is our brain likes a flashlight that produces light that is similar to the ambient light we are adapted to at the time.
as a compromise, jack of all trades, that makes sense to me… when we are daylight adapted, 4000K will appear warmer, but not to the extreme of 2700K.
And at night, when we are adapted to warmer light, 4000K wont look as excessively blue as 5700K.
You think the warmness is your ally? I was born in it, molded by it, I didn’t see a blue photon until I was already a man
Lol, real talk tho I shower almost every night under E17A 1850K light
4500K dedomed 519A (~3800K red tinted?) is my fav general use, I sometimes pair it on a dual channel light with 2700K dd. I have some cool white lights like LEPs and other throwers because that’s almost all you can get, but one of my fav throwers is is a Convoy Z1 in 519A 4000K
