Educate me on "warm" and/or "high CRI"

[the.Mtn.Man]

Unfortunately it seems that Fenix and 4sevens don't care about warm/neutral/highCRI tints anymore.

At least in the case of 4Sevens, it's not so much that they don't care about them but that they haven't found it profitable to carry them as a regular item. They do limited runs every once in a while, and they're apparently considering a high CRI run in the future, but nothing official has been announced.

 

[GaAslamp]

Ok I think I want to get my hands on a Malkoff M61HCRI. This is different from the M61W correct?

Yes, I think that the M61W is intended to be sort of a warmish-neutral 4000K, although the last batch was said to be warmer than usual at 3700K:

http://www.malkoffdevices.com/shop/m60w-warm-tint-beam-to-fit-a-surefire-flashlight-p-33.html

The M61HCRI is even warmer at 3000K, which is similar to incandescent. CRIs tend to be higher in general when the CCT is this low (warm), although 90+ probably means better rendering of blue hues than you would otherwise have in an LED this warm. Here are a couple of comparisons:

http://www.cpfmarketplace.com/mp/sh...61HCRI-(90-)-Exclusive-at-Illumination-Supply!
http://thebrightsideforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=782

At least in the case of 4Sevens, it's not so much that they don't care about them but that they haven't found it profitable to carry them as a regular item. They do limited runs every once in a while, and they're apparently considering a high CRI run in the future, but nothing official has been announced.

I'm pretty sure they're serious about doing a run of warm (3000K) high-CRI flashlights; I've heard nothing about neutral (4000K) high-CRI flashlights from them. Currently they'd have to compromise maximum output quite significantly in order to achieve high CRIs at higher CCTs.

 

[the.Mtn.Man]

I'm pretty sure they're serious about doing a run of warm (3000K) high-CRI flashlights...

Judging by this post in the 4Sevens forum it's only a matter of time.

 

[Yoda4561]

Ok I think I want to get my hands on a Malkoff M61HCRI. This is different from the M61W correct?

Yep, the M61 High CRI in practice looks similar to a surefire incan lamp, but with way way more runtime and almost no tint shift as the batteries runs down. The M61w is really a warmish 3700k neutral (used to be a 4300ish neutral) around 75-80CRI.

 

[the.Mtn.Man]

The problem with trying to use photos to "prove" which color temperature is "better" is that a camera will look its best only when adjusted for present light conditions (in the world of video we do what's called a "white balance"; basically it does for the camera what the brain does for the eye). The reasons the incandescent image above looks overly red (though in my opinion still the most pleasing) is because the camera was not balanced for the lighting conditions and so is an inaccurate representation of what your eye will actually see (if I saw that kind of footage coming out of my video camera, I would consider it a mistake).

Alternatively, we could "prove" that a warm white high CRI flashlight is "best" if we started with incandescent as a reference and balanced the camera accordingly.