The CW is indeed a U2. The NW is a T6. So we’re dealing with different brightness bins.
Yes different brightness bins. Same brightness bin and difference is smaller of course.
I thought NW was T5 thou...
http://www.superfonarik.ru/Fonari/Thrunite/Thrunite-TN31--722.html
hkequipment sell a T6 NW version that they rate at 1050 lumens. So perhaps there’s more than one NW version.
That Russian site probably has older version.
So there is only 8.5% difference between CW U2 and NW T6... I can live with that 
For a lot of the lights I have seen it is only a 7% loss in lumens with NW. Which your eyes are not really going to be able to tell anyway. Not sure where some are coming up with some of this %?
You already have 50-60 leds, so buy one of each instead of waiting. :bigsmile:
Allow me to go off on a couple tangents to cover this.
Direct answer: Sunlight is cool white from around 5000k CCT at the horizon to up to 6500K at noon. ( Cree draws the line between Cool white and Neutral white at 5000K.) It also very closely approximates a black body heated to the same temp which is the CRI (poorly named Color Rendering Index) definition. It has a very well spread distribution of light across the spectrum.
So why would I say neutral if CW is more like the tint of daylight? CCT ignores the overall spectrum;it’s the color of the light put together. You could combine a couple colored LEDs to get whitish light at a CCT. Their would still be huge gaps in their spectrum which would give them poor CRI and only result in wavelengths from the light projected being reflected back. White LEDs we currently know are actually blue LEDs with a phosphor to absorb blue and output other frequency light. They do pretty horribly in putting out light in the cyan part of the spectrum. They have issues down in the reds too. Not surprisingly there’s a nice hefty peak in the blue. Also not surprising that it’s easier to make a cooler/bluer LED with a higher flux bin since you have that spectrum to start with.
There’s some lengthy side discussion about why you can’t just compare CRI (which would always lead you to WW by Cree’s CRI data) that I’ll skip. Let’s just say CRI is really only applicable to compare lights of similar CCT. One example though - An electric stove burner “red hot” is a black body but high CRI doesn’t matter when all the light put out is reddish. Try comparing blue paint samples by the light of only those burners. 
So we’re stuck with a mishmash of looking at spectral data and gauging light by the CCT/CRI combination. Conveniently Cree has the “Relative Spectral Power Distribution” in their XM-L datasheet Go take a look at that graph comparing CW, NW, and WW.
In the cyan gap, the weakest part of the spectrum for all, Neutral puts out the most light of the three. CW is the worst. NW isn’t as strong as WW in the higher frequency light as you move towards red but it’s still better than CW. (Not that WW is on the table in this case but it loses a lot of the blue our eyes associate with the natural sunlight spectrum .)
The frequently mentioned NW is better outdoors than CW is because it has the light to reflect cyan (component of the greenery) and the orange through red (that’s a component of all the browns.) It’s just a more balanced distribution of light that then other Cree options at tints relatively close to sunlight although a little warmer. I also personally always hated the way too warm incan sickly yellow for sight even before their were option.
At this point every LED is a compromise. Depending on what you need light for you may sway towards a different compromise. When LED’s were much dimmer the trade off of a bin or two was a much more noticeable sacrifice and made it a harder call for me. We’re to the point where a more balanced light spectrum makes much more sense to me than a couple extra basically imperceptible lumens.
Well said .
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.