Warmer temp light in the woods?

Fender · Sep 15, 2009

I have read here that a warmer temperature light works better in the woods than a cooler one. Can someone explain why this is? Thanks!

This is also my first post here. I purchased a Surefire E2DL a short while back, and have caught the bug. I then purchased a Malkoff drop in for my 3D Mag I had lying around for years! I am loving this!

zven · Sep 15, 2009

Basically, warmer lights tend to make it easier to distinguish between the various greens and browns out in nature. With your average cool tint LED, trees, grass and other foliage tend to look fairly washed out. When you use a warmer light, however, the different colors stand out better, and the different parts of the foliage "pop out" to your eye. For me, comparing a cool light (e.g., NiteCore D10 or SureFire G2L) to a warm one (e.g., SF P60), the cool light makes the forest look "flat" and 2-dimensional, whereas the incandescent suddenly makes everything appear fully 3-dimensional.

Of course, this all varies from light to light and person to person. And tint/CCT is different from CRI. And beam pattern can often make more of a difference than all the above combined. Et cetera.

zven · Sep 15, 2009

Oh, and it just occurred to me to point out: if you really want to get into the hairy details and technical reasonings behind all of this, search around the forums for explanations of CCT and CRI. And I believe it's McGizmo that has a wonderful explanation of color rendering - I forget exactly where it is on the forum, though.

Tekno_Cowboy · Sep 15, 2009

Welcome to CPF!

Search for High CRI, and you should come across tons of reading on the subject.

I also have lots of links in the Modding thread in my sigline, including a link to the thread started by McGizmo.

jankj · Sep 15, 2009

Color perception is subjective, so your eyes may be different from me. What I see is:

- With a standard "cool" white LED, green grass is somewhat grey-green. Brown threes are somewhat grey. You see colors, but they are all somewhat greyish.

- With neutral white (quarks, fenix TK20), the green is green, the brown is brown.

- With standard "cool white", the light is more glaring and "harder", which makes it harder to see what you're aiming at. It is sort of "what's behind that light ball" experience. With neutral/warm, I see more of what's there. I don't notice the light, I see more clearly what I point the light at.

NE450No2 · Sep 15, 2009

Fender

In the woods nothing can give you the color rendition and depth perception as well as Incandescents.

LED's have their advantages... but it is not "IN THE WOODS".

Outdoors Fanatic · Sep 15, 2009

Use any light with a P90 or HO-9 lamp assembly, it will make your LEDs look like absolute crap-- including any "warm" LED.

Tekno_Cowboy · Sep 15, 2009

I'm going to have to disagree with you when it comes to incans. The High-CRI neutral LED's I use are almost as good in the woods as an over-driven incan, and the LEDs give you the advantage of much longer runtime.

While I can't argue that an incan is top-notch for quality of output, the long runtime offered by an LED outweighs the very slight loss of CRI.

I will admit the the Neutral/Warm Cree LED's don't have nearly as nice of output, due to their lower CRI.

Phaserburn · Sep 15, 2009

Tekno_Cowboy said:
I'm going to have to disagree with you when it comes to incans. The High-CRI neutral LED's I use are almost as good in the woods as an over-driven incan, and the LEDs give you the advantage of much longer runtime.

While I can't argue that an incan is top-notch for quality of output, the long runtime offered by an LED outweighs the very slight loss of CRI.

I will admit the the Neutral/Warm Cree LED's don't have nearly as nice of output, due to their lower CRI.

Perhaps. But High-CRI leds are extremely hard to come by, and not really available in anything short of a custom, $$$ light. Unless you want to mod and can find some.

I wish led light was better quality than incan; the led takeover would be complete. But so far, it just isn't so. The depth perception difference is even more important to me than even the color tint. Walking an uneven trail is far easier with an incan.

To truly see the difference, try an incan and led of comparable output with the head of the flashlight removed and the emitter/bulb exposed. The led should be of approx half the lumens as the incan because it is emitting in approx a 180 degree arc vs 360 for the bulb.

Fender · Sep 15, 2009

Thanks a lot for the help. I'm really enjoying this new hobby and the information is really interesting!

Outdoors Fanatic · Sep 15, 2009

Phaserburn said:
Perhaps. But High-CRI leds are extremely hard to come by, and not really available in anything short of a custom, $$$ light. Unless you want to mod and can find some.

I wish led light was better quality than incan; the led takeover would be complete. But so far, it just isn't so. The depth perception difference is even more important to me than even the color tint. Walking an uneven trail is far easier with an incan.

To truly see the difference, try an incan and led of comparable output with the head of the flashlight removed and the emitter/bulb exposed. The led should be of approx half the lumens as the incan because it is emitting in approx a 180 degree arc vs 360 for the bulb.

+1

I agree 100%. High-CRI LEDs are still very elusive products only found in high-end customs, not to mention they are very dim in output compared to regular LEDs. Also it is very true that depth perception/contrast is much more importat than color temperature, and that's precisely what makes incan dominate the outdoors like no other light source. I'm not even going to to touch on the subject of throw and the ability to cut through fog and haze...

ZMZ67 · Sep 15, 2009

zven said:
Basically, warmer lights tend to make it easier to distinguish between the various greens and browns out in nature. With your average cool tint LED, trees, grass and other foliage tend to look fairly washed out. When you use a warmer light, however, the different colors stand out better, and the different parts of the foliage "pop out" to your eye. For me, comparing a cool light (e.g., NiteCore D10 or SureFire G2L) to a warm one (e.g., SF P60), the cool light makes the forest look "flat" and 2-dimensional, whereas the incandescent suddenly makes everything appear fully 3-dimensional.

Of course, this all varies from light to light and person to person. And tint/CCT is different from CRI. And beam pattern can often make more of a difference than all the above combined. Et cetera.

Nice explanation.Works the same way for me,details are more pronounced under warmer light outdoors.Indoors the advantages are not as great but warmer light can still be better in some circumstances.

kwkarth · Sep 15, 2009

Fender,
Here's a link to a shootout thread that has lots of beamshots from all different types and color temperature and CRI lights.

Notice in some pictures the differences between the brown grasses and the green grasses really stand out, and in other pictures the two almost look the same color. That is the difference the neutral white LED's make compared to the typical cool white ones.

Link

Regardless of how the LED's are binned, if they possess greater CRI (Color rendering Index) then you'll see all the colors of the rainbow better.

No amount of talking or biases can take the place of these pictures.

Best of luck and :welcome:

Swedpat · Sep 15, 2009

Personally I think that it should be enough to state the fact a warmer tint is better out in the field than a cool undependent if it's a LED or an incan. Yes, I agree that an incan still is better than a warm LED for the contrast and 3D experience, but if one prefer a LED light because of it's advantages the warm tinted is superior.
I say it because this discussion sometimes tends to be a battle between warm LED and incan when the original question was about cool or warm tint, not about warm LED or incan. Or did I misunderstand?

Regards, Patric

Outdoors Fanatic · Sep 15, 2009

Swedpat said:
Personally I think that it should be enough to state the fact a warmer tint is better out in the field than a cool undependent if it's a LED or an incan. Yes, I agree that an incan still is better than a warm LED for the contrast and 3D experience, but if one prefer a LED light because of it's advantages the warm tinted is superior.
I say it because this discussion sometimes tends to be a battle between warm LED and incan when the original question was about cool or warm tint, not about warm LED or incan. Or did I misunderstand?

Regards, Patric

That's a quite easy battle, 'cause just about anything out there is better than the Abominable Cool White LED outdoors...:devil:

kwkarth · Sep 15, 2009

Swedpat said:
Personally I think that it should be enough to state the fact a warmer tint is better out in the field than a cool undependent if it's a LED or an incan. Yes, I agree that an incan still is better than a warm LED for the contrast and 3D experience, but if one prefer a LED light because of it's advantages the warm tinted is superior.
I say it because this discussion sometimes tends to be a battle between warm LED and incan when the original question was about cool or warm tint, not about warm LED or incan. Or did I misunderstand?

Regards, Patric

You are right Patric

Tekno_Cowboy · Sep 15, 2009

Phaserburn said:
Perhaps. But High-CRI leds are extremely hard to come by, and not really available in anything short of a custom, $$$ light. Unless you want to mod and can find some.

...

To truly see the difference, try an incan and led of comparable output with the head of the flashlight removed and the emitter/bulb exposed. The led should be of approx half the lumens as the incan because it is emitting in approx a 180 degree arc vs 360 for the bulb.

You are right that decent High-CRI LED's are hard to come by. I have to go to a distributor halfway around the world to get a hold of the SSC's, and the only way to get Nichia's LED's is in a full reel. While they are hard to come by, they're definitely worth the extra work to find. :thumbsup:

The amount of light emitted has nothing to do with the direction it is emitted in. Given an incan and an LED that put out the same amount of light, the intensity would actually be greater with the LED, due to the fact all the light is being emitted forward.

Outdoors Fanatic · Sep 15, 2009

Tekno_Cowboy said:
You are right that decent High-CRI LED's are hard to come by. I have to go to a distributor halfway around the world to get a hold of the SSC's, and the only way to get Nichia's LED's is in a full reel. While they are hard to come by, they're definitely worth the extra work to find. :thumbsup:

The amount of light emitted has nothing to do with the direction it is emitted in. Given an incan and an LED that put out the same amount of light, the intensity would actually be greater with the LED, due to the fact all the light is being emitted forward.

Given an incan and an LED that put out the same amount of light, the intensity would actually be greater with the LED, due to the fact all the light is being emitted forward.

Not true. Take a basic P60 lamp assembly as a reference. Compare it to a 60-80 lumens LED in the same reflector (the P60L for example) the incan will easily out throw it because it has higher beam intensity in the same area (higher lux). Heck, even the much smaller E2e incan out throws an 80 lumens LED in a D26 reflector. Incans have far greater surface brightness that's why it easily out throws an LED in the same host or reflector. Surface brightness is the most important index value for throw/beam intensity.

Linger · Sep 15, 2009

those beamshots are interesting but the real advantage of 'warm' tints come when lighting up trees / bushes, forest. I say that yes we can see that the cool white beamshots on the grass move things towards monochoromatic cool white reflections, however, best images of warm tint goodness come when you realise you're looking at the trunk of a tree and the branches, rather then being blinded by the cool white reflecting off the leaves.

Tekno_Cowboy · Sep 15, 2009

Phaserburn said:
To truly see the difference, try an incan and led of comparable output with the head of the flashlight removed and the emitter/bulb exposed. The led should be of approx half the lumens as the incan because it is emitting in approx a 180 degree arc vs 360 for the bulb.

Outdoors Fanatic said:
Not true. Take a basic P60 lamp assembly as a reference. Compare it to a 60-80 lumens LED in the same reflector (the P60L for example) the incan will easily out throw it because it has higher beam intensity in the same area (higher lux). Heck, even the much smaller E2e incan out throws an 80 lumens LED in a D26 reflector. Incans have far greater surface brightness that's why it easily out throws an LED in the same host or reflector. Surface brightness is the most important index value for throw/beam intensity.

I was referring to the specific example by Phaserburn, with the bulb, reflector exposed. In that example, it should be the exact opposite of what was said.(double rather than half)

Warmer temp light in the woods?

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