My vote is for neutral.
The U2 is 20% brighter - a difference which is barely perceptible to the eye. For actual use, neutral is much more pleasant to the eyes and gives much better color rendition.
The three bears. Anyone remember this story?
Too hot, too cold and just neutral.
This would be an easy choice for me: T6 3C, 5000K. This is as ‘Neutral’ as you will get from an XM-L, and the nicest tint I have seen from an XM-L. The U2 is not a color bin, it’s an output bin (color bin is not specified on this light for the U2) so you could get as high as 8300K. Per Cree specs, the U2 is 7% higher output than the T6 bin, on average.
http://www.illuminationgear.com/85243.html
this is the best answer I've ever seen it's straight to the point . and has nice pics
one of the better arguments is you'll always have too many cw lights ...and a great tint is intoxicating.
in the woods or in the garden ,anywhere with greens ,browns ,reds ...etc. neutrals rule
You asked about favorite tints .
I like nichia 219 emitters
and in the x lamp cree's I like 4B,4C,5B
buy the neutral
Informative website!
Did anyone try the ishihara test? I passed it without a single error. Good to know I’m not color blind. Not that I ever had a doubt I was.
+1
This entirely depends on the chromaticity of the measurement and yours isn’t necessarily more accurate than cree’s.
The hypnotoad told …… me …… to …… buy …… 3 ……. new …………. lights today. I must obey. All obey the hypnotoad.
I see his eyes wherever I look now. Must obey.
I’m struggling to resist the urge to click buy it now….not so much because its neutral as because I’ve been after that xintd for a while, and I’m a touch disappointed in the small sun that just arrived. :~
>>>>>I’m struggling to resist the
I could no longer resist. The hypnotoad’s power forced me to buy the Xin. I’m not going to say which tint I bought until I get it and test it for myself. But after all this discussion (thanks to everyone), I actually lost sleep over it last night, trying to decide, so it wasn’t a decison easily made.
Here’s an interesting thought though: Being a pro photog back in the old film days, I know firsthand how green fluorescents look on daylight film. Back in the day, I had a veritable suitcase of magenta and orange and blue filters to correct the hundreds of Kelvin combinations of fluoresecent/tungsten/daylight that occured in just about any on-location photo shoot.
However, give the human eye a few seconds and it turns the most god-awful green-tinted fluorscent into what looks like daylight. It’s still green on the film, but the eye adjusts it to its own internal white card — and the green disappears in your mind’s eye on location. Not on film of course. That stays green.
So since BLFers are some of sharpest tacks I have had pleasure dealing with, most can now see where this is going. I wonder whether the eye after a few seconds can tell the diff between a U2 or NW. Especially since — usually when you’re using a torch — you’re outsiude in the pitch black with no light sources to compare it with. Sure, side by side, NW and the U2 look radically different. But when we’re looking at one or the other, can the eye even tell?? I wonder.
Brings to mind a beer-tasting test I heard on a popular radio show a few years ago. The tasters SWORE left and right that they could tell their favorite brand come heck or high water. I thought one or two would get it wrong. But to a man, once blindfolded, every single person could NOT ID the beers. 99% wrong. It was areal eye opener.
Heineken drinkers could NOT tell the diff between a heinekin and a Bud — if blindfolded. To me that is just astounding. When I used to drink beer, most american beers tasted like swill to me. Foo-foo designer beers tasted like heaven on earth …. or so I thought. I had my wife test me, and you guessed it. I could not tell the difference. I thought maybe the radio taste test was a setup. I was wrong.
So when all is said and done, I wonder if I could even tell the difference between these two tints if there wasn’t another tint to compare it with.
As Lumatic says: I’m just saying.
Thanks again everyone for joining in. This is one interesting thread.
A 3 to 1 tint is more dramatic than between mainstream lagers. Not quite a porter/stout but at an IPA.
[quote=Ubehebe]
>>>>
Brings to mind a beer-tasting test I heard on a popular radio show a few years ago. The tasters SWORE left and right that they could tell their favorite brand come heck or high water. I thought one or two would get it wrong. But to a man, once blindfolded, every single person could NOT ID the beers. 99% wrong. It was areal eye opener.
Heineken drinkers could NOT tell the diff between a heinekin and a Bud — if blindfolded. To me that is just astounding. When I used to drink beer, most american beers tasted like swill to me. Foo-foo designer beers tasted like heaven on earth …. or so I thought. I had my wife test me, and you guessed it. I could not tell the difference. I thought maybe the radio taste test was a setup. I was wrong.
quote]
LOL…utter Balderdash ! If they coudn’t tell the difference, it was because they were NOT REAL BEER DRIKERS. Apparently, you aren’t either. But I digress.
Back on topic…
I bet you bought the NW…and probably the cool white also… NW is the way to go.
To be fair, all lager tastes like chemical crap. Proper beers at least give you a chance, its hard to tell lager from window cleaner. At least with a neutral tint, compared to a cool white tint, you only have to shine it on a flower to see the difference. I currently have one more neutral tint light, I have no idea in the tint bin, I bought it modified, but just a green bush really pops under the light compared with other lights that just wash out all the colour.
I think even the most discerning folks might have trouble pinning down a precise tint bin (1A vs 1B, or perhaps even 1A vs 2A, for example), but the difference between, say, 1A and 3C is pretty obvious. At the moment there are 3 P60 drop-ins that I’m playing with the most in different hosts. They are a CW T6 (not sure of the precise bin), a T6 3C, and a T5 5C1. If I forget which drop-in is in which host, all I have to do is turn them on. And I don’t mean I have to figure this out by way of comparison. I just turn one on, shine it around, and I know what it is, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one.
>>>>>LOL…utter Balderdash ! If they coudn’t tell the difference,
>>>>>>it was because they were NOT REAL BEER DRIKERS.
I didn’t try to ID stout over some foo-foo apricot watermelon chocolate beer. That would be cheating.
But they were all the “popular” domestic brands and “popular” imported. Iller, Bud, Micheload, Coors, Sam adams, St. Pauli, Heinekin, Spaten (NOT ULtimator hahahahha), Corona, etc.
As each contestant failed to ID basically anything, the next guy would boast he would do much better and the other guy was an idiot, etc. But he’d do even worse.
At the end, 99% of the IDs were wrong.
hahahahah Maybe we should set up the first annual BLF blindfold beer ID taste-off and Cree tint test. Winner gets a wrong order from Manafont that can’t be returned. Or a $7.50 DD gift certificate instead of the ordered Trustfire X6. 
It’s basically the same story in wines. Plenty of empirical evidence exist that the supposed nuances of terroir, etc. is bullshit or at the very least less important than just about everything else (eg. storage, decanting, etc, etc). Very much doubt anyone except experts (NOT “connoisseurs”) under control conditions can even distinguish between varietals from different makers.
You had a chance to answer this question for yourself, with your own eyes….
Punt.
Interesting. I think comparative is the key word.
If you only had one light or drank one kind of beer or wine, then likely you would not be able to pick others by virtue of not having any reference to compare them with
Professional tasters, wine, beer, spirits, coffee, tea, constantly taste and compare many varieties. That helps build a reference library which the brain can remember, recall and use to compare in ideal circumstances.
Like the old incan lights we used to rely on, we knew they were yellowish tints even if we did not know the meaning of the word then.
But then, having compared that to another better tint, suddenly the incan just doesn’t compete anymore. We now know there is something better. That knowledge becomes part of our memory and experience.
I know the eye adjusts, rather the brain adjusts what the eye sees. But to what degree can it compensate?
I can read or watch TV without my glasses, but it makes my eyes tired and sore. It makes me feel tired too.
Surely good tint is more natural and soothing? I’m sure there is lots of research on the effects of tint and colour on the human psyche.
I think there is only so much the brain can filter out, even though we can if necessary make do with much less than the ideal.
People are different, eyes are different. Some like lager, some like stout. Please your eyes not mine. I do like 6500 k wc bin xre’s though. Each color bin is a range so 2 different 1A’s might not look the same. For my mtb, never liked the old yellow incans but cool whites cast harsh shadows. Makes me feel like I’m riding in a horror flick.