I'm de-doming my SST-50's. Results...

[kengps]

I accidentally knocked the dome off my Lumapower VX Ultra, and the Lux went from 8000 to 16,000. It was a bit ringy however. I have experimented with the Tiablo A9 and A50 reflectors and find them to be excellent with the SST-50. So I tried the de-domed pill and got about 23,000 with the A9 with just some minor rings only noticeable on a white wall. The A50 reflector looked good too, so I took a chance and de-domed it too. Lux went from 29,100 to 43,400 and the beam is 100% perfect. The hotspot is now about half the diameter, but there seems to be about the same amount of light off center, so I didn't lose anything other than the hot-spot size. With a UCL lens it's doing 47,100 Lux. The A50 is not 900 lumens as it is advertised but 500 lumens (1.4 amps w/ 2 rcr123) Not bad. Can't wait till my 2.8 amp drivers arrive. 65,000 lux from a 2.8 amp SST-50 maybe?? I tried the "Solarforce Masterpiece Pro" Which is said to be a copy of the A10 reflector and it was pretty bad. So I sure hope Tiablo will hurry the hell up and introduce the Dual-Textured reflector here in the USA. 900 lumens would be nice too.

 

[Gryphen]

Isn't there a domeless model of the sst-50 and sst-90?

 

[tolkaze]

Good to see some results with a de-domed sst-50. I've taken the domes off some cree LED's before, and thought the results for throwers were okay, but couldn't justify destroying something like the sst-50 just yet.

I think this would increase the Lux more than something like light-recycling etc

 

[easilyled]

saabluster has done quite a lot of experimenting in de-doming leds and he concluded that whilst you increase the throw (lux) you lose about 30% in overall output (lumens)

 

[kramer5150]

Craig accidentally knocked the dome off his Catapult... IIRC it was one of the early run defective batches that had the reflector crashing into the LED. IIRC iit dimmed the output significantly.