XP-E vs XR-E - what's the difference?

Looking about XR-E equipped lights still seem hugely popular and easy to buy or as drop ins for other lights. And it’s well established as still being a throw King.

The XP-E seems almost never mentioned by comparison, although in one thread I saw someone said XR-E for aspheric and XP-E for reflectors.

So how do these two emitters actually stack up to each other? And why do you think you don’t see many XP-E lights or drop ins?

I believe the xr-e is older, and it often produces a ringy beam.

XRE is or was a good way of putting out usable mid range illumination in small packages. OP reflectors make them very useful outdoor flashlights and they throw extremely well in a deep reflector. As far as I played I find XPEs to focus harder with reflectors and I prefer OP with them too. XPE’s are more flexible by their size, I think, and give a more general purpose beam for EDCs. I don’t think they can beat XREs in throw easily. I had been playing with my C8 flashlight plus XPGs and XPEs with some success but I once again saw how it threw with an XRE and decided to leave it like that.

Doesn't the XR-E have a higher max current? (Sorry I'm too lazy to look it up.)

EDIT - ok, did a quick Google search. Seems Cree rates both at 1A max, but a CPF thread showed the XP-E needs some serious heatsinking (i.e. directly soldered to copper) to be effective about 1A. So it seems the XR-E is much easier to driver harder and probably can be driven harder.

-Garry

Good subject!

I was looking at that max throw shop site and noticed that in the small sun c10 that they use a neutral xpe in it and getting 107k lux on the light. Before i saw that in the stats i figured they were using the xre. So go figure that out because after reading here so much about max throw equals xre R2.

Does that mean that the lux would have been higher if they had used and xre?

Posted on iphone

They use the same die(s), just different packaging. The packaged dome for the newer xp-e outputs a more distributed beam while the older one a more “focused” one (bit more light straight ahead than to the sides). Not really a massive diff.