What's your light with the worst tint?

LED Flashlights – General Info
1

I’m curious what people’s worst tints are, especially if it’s from a model that should have a better tint. We all know cheap $1 lights will come with an awful blue cool-white tint, but what about more expensive lights?

My worst tint is probably on my Creelant V4A with the neutral-white Cree XP-L HI option. It’s a 4xAA light I got on a group buy here. I was expecting a traditional neutral white tint: descent, but a hint of green in the corona.

However, what I got is a fairly even beam, without much color change across the beam, and no hint of green. So, what’s my problem?

My issue is that it has horrible CRI. Things just look washed out and bland and harsh under this light. It’s very unpleasant, and makes it hard on the eyes after awhile. It’s much worse than a traditional cool-white light. It looks better if I keep the brightness down, which makes it harder to pick out colors for criticism (this is indoors tail-standing). But on full
output (tail-standing), it’s almost like light from a low-pressure-sodium highway light. :confounded:

2

47s Quark 2AA-X. Horrible horrible green, ’though I love the twist-selector.

Early Zanflare F1 in “NW”. Pea-soup green on top of yellow. “CW” is closer to NW, but still green-tinted. The CW is a much better tint than NW, even though I like the warmer end of the spectrum.

Thorfire VG10S. Thick schoolbus yellow corona in the beam (also kinda ringy). Love love love the regular VG10, though.

Jetbeam Jet-I and -II, kinda green, but not too horrible. Nice smooth beam otherwise. I “EDC” a II in my bag as a just-in-case light.

Cheaper lights that I intended to just use as hosts, I’m dismissing w/o even mentioning. Lots of CW, luckily few if any truly Angry Blue™.

3

Nitecore SRT7. It’s my fault though. I did a hot gas dodome on the stock XML2 and it shifted way more yellow than I thought it would. As soon as Richard gets some more SST40s in stock I’ll be good to go.

4

My 4 Sevens ‘everything’. Love the lights themselves (especially the Minis), but not one has a tint I can tolerate. To make things worse, I’ve never been able to pry one open to mod it!

5

Most of my current light have Nichia or are pleasantly neutral/warm, so probably worst is BLF A6 in 1A, which is not that bad by itself, just compared to the rest I do not like it and hate to use it, especially in forests it sucks.
The very “purply” lights like Petzls, Black Diamond and few other monstrosities I had to give away :nerd_face:

6

Same here. Replacing mine with a XM-L T6 4C when it comes in.

7

Old Fenix TK22 had a horrible greenish tint, I replaced it immediately…

8

Worst tint:

Fenix PD32vn with “PDTn” which costs extra $$ and supossed to provide better tint after dedome… how do I say it… the tint was green! It made you nauseous without need for strobe. Luckily my first and last Vn light.

Nowadays Vn fanboys still love these super green dedomed tint lights despite the availability of HI emitters.

Honorable mention:

Armytek wizard v3 XHP50… the “CW” tint is like 4500K

It’s not neutral nor warm, just yellow. But because it’s not greenish, it is somewhat usable.

9

How about multiple tints, and for good measure, horrible streaks. This is a cheap work light, like the one here.

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10

One of the worst tints I met was when investigating high CRI leds, still thinking, being used to Nichia, that high CRI at least provides good tint. Well, the 4000K 92CRI 2nd gen. Oslon Square proved otherwise, it had a terrible greenish tint.

….while knowing better, I tried to do a tint shot of 5 flashlights with different 4000K leds, to show how bad that high CRI Square is . In reality, 4 out of 5 are pretty close in tint, a agreeable balanced brownish warm/neutral, only the above mentioned Oslon Square is ugly greenish. When photographed however, it looks dramatically different, a rainbow of tints and the Square did not look half that bad! I did choose the white balance that resembled what I saw best, but it is hopeless:

Left to right:
*BLF-A6 (5A tint Cree XP-L),
*Nitecore EC21 (Nichia 219C sm4070e R9050)
*Jaxman E2L (Lumileds Luxeon V 4000K)
*Luckysun mini20 (Osram Oslon Square 2nd 4000K 92CRI)
*Jaxman E2L (Nichia 219B sw403 R9080)

Conclusion once more: do not show tint shots, they are nonsense.

11

Thrunite TN12(2016) warm white.

It has decent output, but was terrible for photography. Introduced a greenish-yellow tint into my photos, which then also brought in a lot of purple while trying to fix it during post-processing. Id rather use my $20 cool white Walmart zoomie than that thing. Id have already swapped out the LED, but the Nichia 219C on a 16mm MCPCB I bought is too big.

12

I think your photo is very useful, it shows how the Nichias are pink, and the neutrals are yellow

the problem getting the green of the oslon to show, is possibly due to the lumen level being too low, but overall, I really like your photo… probably because Im used to looking at beam shots, and I recognize that pink nichias have very good red color rendering, such as when looking at things with red in them, like the palm of my hand. The low cri LEDs make my hand look dead, and make red things look brown. That is why I never felt a neutral white low cri LED could compete with a neutral white High CRI nichia. Ive tried Cree high CRI, and it tends to have a lot more Green in it than my nichias.

I don’t love green.

One of the worst LEDs for excess green Imo besides the XP-L and XM-L2, is the XP-G3. I have an XPG3 that has a purple center and green corona. this pic looks like the same colors I see, except mine are not in a line.

Bear in mind Im a total tint and CRI, snob, and my favorite LED is the sw45 9080 Nichia 219b. I even find the 219c leds objectionably yellow/green, compared to some of the best N219b, that look pink in a photo.

a note about tint perception
When I use my lights in full dark adapted situations, I notice green a lot more than if I use a light during the day. I think that is because there is a lot of green in sunlight, so a flashlight making green blends in. Also, in sunlight, there is plenty of Red Light, so the lack of red in a low cri light is not that important during the day, when there is ambient sunlight combining with the flashlight beam, such as when an auto mechanic is working outdoors during the day.

different color and tints work differently when fully dark adapted, than when adapted to cooler color temperatures.

so someone whose job is to drive a service vehicle to a job site, on a sunny day, and then use a flashlight to illuminate shadows in a basement, will tolerate low CRI and large amounts of green tint, better, than someone camping in a dark area with no ambient light, or waking up in a dark house to go to the bathroom, or other settings where the brain is not adapted to sunlight.

13

Olight x7 CW, horrible Green, green everywhere

14

P60 P1 host with XPG3-S3 emitter. makes a brown-green and purplish-blue beam.

Although, I have gotten used to it.

15

Reading the above I see that most people dislike* green and yellow* tints. Why is that?

I personally can’t stand any purple and blue-magenta shades, but yellow or green tints looks fine, not unpleasant to me.
Is there some reason explaining why it is green and yellow tints that irritates so many people here? :question:

16

4SEVENS Malestrom / Pea green / Got it for $45 at Blade Show 2014 from David Chow / Brand new in box. So I can live with it. :wink:

17

This forum needs diversity training.

18

lol

19

The “worse” tint of my good flashlights is on my neutral white Sunwayman D40A. Although at the time when I got it, I liked it much better than its cool white counterpart that I got weeks before. Then I got another neutral white flashlight and it blew the tint away. In comparison, the tint on the D40A looks a little green. By itself it looks fine and still does today, but it doesn’t look as good as my other neutral white flashlights. The cool white D40A looks great compared to the cheapo blueish tint flashlights that have been acquired over the years.

Edited since I just did a comparison and the D40A is not as bad as I remembered. :person_facepalming:

20

Worst tint of all my lights is Fenix E01. Why Fenix chose to spoil an otherwise wonderful light by using this blue purple tint escapes me.