Which lights work well with dedomed emitter(s), and with which dedomed emitter(s)

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

Hi,

I’ve recently started dedoming a few emitters, and tried them in a few lights, and my limited experience has been that not every combination works “well”. By “well” here, I mean getting a nice beam with “high” lux readings.

I’ve had good luck the first time in a couple of cases, and also spent some time switching back and forth to a dedomed emitter among different lights, and it occurred to me that

  • It’s kind of hit-or-miss whether the combination of light and dedomed emitter works “well” and
  • If I don’t find a combo that works “well” right away, it’s kind of a tedious task trying to find a good combo.

Also, I don’t know about others here, but I don’t have an infinite supply of hosts that I’m willing to try.

So, I thought that it might be a good thing to start a thread where we could report combos of lights+emitter types that work “well”, as well as combos that didn’t work “well”. I think that it’d be good to also report driver info and lux numbers for the combos, as kind of benchmarks.

So, I’ll start with a couple that worked “well”:

  • Jacob A60 (dedomed XM-L U3, direct drive): 87 Klux
  • Shorty FandyFire STL-V6 (dedomed (XM-L T6, direct drive): 113 - 122 Klux (measured with 2 different meters)
2

Cheap C8s work alright too, normally gives 30kcd on dedomed XM-L T6 without driver swap (tailcap ~2.6-3A). Nice usable beam. Proper heatsinking + direct drive should push it around 40k. Not as impressive as above lights but don’t forget thet’re all under $10.

Not so impressed with dedomed XP-G, pushes 50k+ but beam too thin to be usable.

3

De-domed XPG2 in a smooth P60 XML reflector (with the big hole, small XPG-specific reflectors DON'T work) is pretty damn awesome. Everyone should have one of those. Tightest beam comes with the thinnest possible insulator.

I have an Ultrafire C8 that came with a XRE, it does not work with a XPG2, either domed or de-domed. I think that's just this particular reflector is garbage and nothing to do with the C8 platform. It's good but not very tight beam with a domed XML2, de-domed XML2 it gives a very tight center spot and throws OK but it also gets very ringy.

Another thing to keep in mind is that reflector/LED positioning gets a lot more picky with a de-domed emitter.