Warm White LED for better outdoor color rendering

Advice needed :candle:

1.
I find that my LED lights are great indoors, but outdoors the feeling is very ghostly. The light has this moonlight quality and makes objects look flat. I think this has something to do with the spectrum of the LED lights.
Light gray tree bark is quite bright and prominent, while the brown ground looks black.
I also found that my incandescent flashlights provided better lighting outdoors, but the light became too reddish very soon as the batteries drained down.

2.
Recently I found on Ebay ProLight star Warm White LEDs with about 35 lumens per watt efficiency.
http://www.prolightopto.com/pdf/1W%20data%20sheet.pdf
http://www.prolightopto.com/1wdatasheet.asp
Would one of those be a good substitution?

3. I need a suggestion for real easy upgrade (open flashlight, solder the star, glue and close). I dont need any focusing or reflector. A difused, wide beam is best. My initial idea was to modify a Bonfire Blaze.

Could some of the more experienced users provide an opinion on my Warm White LED idea.

Thanks in advance

Sorry, I don't have any suggestions for adding a LED with a warmer tint. The only LED upgrade I have done is putting a Nite Ize drop-in in a Mini Maglite. I am curious about your incandescents, though. I have not heard of incandescent light turning red before. What flashlights have you been using?

There are a couple of options open to you.

1) Replace your existing LED with one which has a more "greenish" tint. You will not like it as well indoors, but it will be much more pleasing outdoors.

2) I would use the Luxeon warm white 1 watt instead of the "pro light".

http://www.lumileds.com/pdfs/DS47.pdf

If you compare the two spectrum plots, the Luxeon warm white is much closer to an incan than your original selection.

None of these warm white lights are going to impress you as "power full". Basically you are trading off efficiency for color quality, nonetheless, they are good for your stated reasons.

Warm White Luxeon vs Prolight

Thanks, HarryN!
You are right - the warm white Luxeon has wider spectrum then the warm white Prolight. Too bad the ww Luxeon is not available in a Lambertian package. I will need to mount it in some sort of reflector and then think of some kind of a diffuser to place in front of it.:thinking:
If I am not careful I might just build me a $89 flashlights that ends up no better than them walmart kids lights with Disney caracters painted all over .

Any suggestions on how to easily achieve that? I need to get a wide diffused flood out of the front end.
My mp3 player is an almost inexhaustible source of half drrained AA batteries. Too bad there are no regulated incandescent AA flashlights!

Yuck. I thought that one of the major benefits of LED light is the crystal clarity of the white, and even yes the bluish tint at the edges. I thought we all rejoiced at the end of the yellowing-light era with which the incandescent flashlight plagued us.

I for one do not miss yellow "warm" light. Give me the ice-blue of an LED any day.

-Jeffrey

iamerror said:

Sorry, I don't have any suggestions for adding a LED with a warmer tint. The only LED upgrade I have done is putting a Nite Ize drop-in in a Mini Maglite. I am curious about your incandescents, though. I have not heard of incandescent light turning red before. What flashlights have you been using?

Click to expand...

Sorry for the misleading description. Actually the light turns dim and brownish and yellow.

My incandescent is a yellow & black plastic 2xAA torch with a tiny bi-pin bulb. I think there must be some advantage in having sush small bulb. Maybe the light source is closer to a sigle point and easier to focus. Maybe it somehow helps the efficiency to have a small bulb volume. Maybe someone can elucidate .

I coudn't think of any diffuser and finally "frosted" the front lense with sandpaper . It worked reasonably well, but a quarter of the light is lost. Now I see that the inside of the bulb is darkening - time to search for a replacement.

peacefuljeffrey said:

Yuck. I thought that one of the major benefits of LED light is the crystal clarity of the white, and even yes the bluish tint at the edges. I thought we all rejoiced at the end of the yellowing-light era with which the incandescent flashlight plagued us.

I for one do not miss yellow "warm" light. Give me the ice-blue of an LED any day.

-Jeffrey

Click to expand...

The sun that our planet revolves around doesn't put out "ice-blue" light, so we see better with bright incans or warmer LED's. Most "warm" LED's still look pretty blue compared to bright incans.

I missed that Lambertian aspect of the LL product, but judging from the design of the other LED package, I think it is not very lambertian either.

In any event, if you want a flood beam, just put it in a reflector which is very textured - sand it if you need to. The hot spot will be essentially gone. Georges80's web site (taskled.com) shows a sort of snake light product he uses for reading - the reflectors are sand blasted IIRC.

Color temperature and color rendering are very personal aspects of lighting that we tend to deal with automatically in our homes. You can bet that GE and Philips spent a fortune over the years tuning lights to have various CCTs, etc. to deal with the effects of genetics, aging, mood, etc.

1: without any kind of focusing the light will only be useful for reading by night. Use a widebeam optics. (Or learn to live with more focused beams, I seldom use my fraen-optics mod because the reflector beam gives more throw if needed, but works almost equally for indoor applications.
2: the ww gives the same feel as an incan, but the output has barely improved durning the last years, while the real whites more than doubled theirs. Better try some different tints (more on the green or red side, instead of blue, if this helps)

Re: Warm White Luxeon vs Prolight

There is a regulated aa incan. See: http://www.lightingpro.org/products.htm?

It's a drop in solution for a 2d light. There are still some available here on cpf for sale. It's pretty nice. I have 2, but none for sale.

stamat said:

Thanks, HarryN!
You are right - the warm white Luxeon has wider spectrum then the warm white Prolight. Too bad the ww Luxeon is not available in a Lambertian package. I will need to mount it in some sort of reflector and then think of some kind of a diffuser to place in front of it.:thinking:
If I am not careful I might just build me a $89 flashlights that ends up no better than them walmart kids lights with Disney caracters painted all over .

Any suggestions on how to easily achieve that? I need to get a wide diffused flood out of the front end.
My mp3 player is an almost inexhaustible source of half drrained AA batteries. Too bad there are no regulated incandescent AA flashlights!

Click to expand...

Another option is to remove the blue with an optical filter . Take a look at this thread about tint adjustment.
http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=115777

The luxeon lottery can produce some decent warmer tints that are better than color than others. I think W1 bins are warmer and still as efficient as they are still "white." I compared several of my thrower LEDs outside on the trees at the back of my yard a few weeks ago, and though I compared lux 3 LEDs and one regulated incan (Surefire A2), one LED had visibly more definition identifying depth and color shades in the irregular leafy canopy than the other LEDs and almost as good, if not as good as the regulated A2 due to it's tint. All but the warm white (slight yellow-brown tinge on white wall) one gave a pale green to all the leaves, while my WW one let me see some variation in leaf color and more minor depth changes across the canopy of leaves.
The incan A2 was good too. I did not try my greenest tinted LED, I will have to try that.

FYI, some LEDs can be turned from a thrower to a pure floody by removing the bezel/reflector assembly. Some need the reflector as a heat sink and to hold in the LED, but some don't like the Nuwai TM115, which is a thrower with spill until you remove the bezel and then you have no spot/throw, just direct light from the emitter.

Yuck. I thought that one of the major benefits of LED light is the crystal clarity of the white, and even yes the bluish tint at the edges. I thought we all rejoiced at the end of the yellowing-light era with which the incandescent flashlight plagued us.

Click to expand...

The color spectrum of LEDs is one of their major deficiences and one of the reasons that LEDs are still inferior to incandescent.

THIS may help you https://www.candlepowerforums.com/posts/1425767&postcount=253

LEDninja said:

Another option is to remove the blue with an optical filter . Take a look at this thread about tint adjustment.
http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=115777

Click to expand...

The only problem is that by doing that you are only removing some of the blue, on a light that has a larger part of its light in the blue are of the spectrum it will signifigantly dim the light. Whereas a warm white led or and incan actully produces light over a wider spectrum. I don't know a whole lot about light so someone can correct me if I'm wrong

InfidelCastro said:

The sun that our planet revolves around doesn't put out "ice-blue" light, so we see better with bright incans or warmer LED's. Most "warm" LED's still look pretty blue compared to bright incans.

Click to expand...

Well, I was always under the impression that the sun's light was heavy on the blue end of the spectrum, especially compared to indoor light (traditionally incandescent), which was far more yellow-orange.

I was not talking about what is (subjectively) "best" to see by: just what I like looking at.

-Jeffrey

David_Campen said:

The color spectrum of LEDs is one of their major deficiences and one of the reasons that LEDs are still inferior to incandescent.

Click to expand...

Depends on who's judging, and using what criteria.

For one simple and obvious example, um, what if a drop to a stone floor is in the future for my flashlight? Which type is inferior now? :touche:

-Jeffrey

Depends on who's judging, and using what criteria.

For one simple and obvious example, um, what if a drop to a stone floor is in the future for my flashlight? Which type is inferior now?

Click to expand...

The criteria that you were discussing was color rendition and by that criteria LEDs are vastly inferior. And, it is not just a matter of what color you like. The problem with LEDs is that they emit a narrow spectrum of color: this means that you are unable to see details that would be revealed by the broader spectrum of an incandescent light.

When I am hiking I carry both LED and incandescent - incandescent for when I want to be able to see well and LED for backup if the incandescent fails or I run low on batteries.

I was not talking about what is (subjectively) "best" to see by: just what I like looking at.

Click to expand...

Oh, OK, by that criteria - LED flashlights as toys not tools then, yeah, whatever color you think looks cool.

The original poster does have a good point here. Public safety First Responders may want to make note of this if using a LED light. A perfectly healthy (well ... maybe close to healthy for a guy my age, ) could appear to be kind of pale or even dead under an LED light. I used myself a subject for this once, and my skin looked a bit bluish, almost like what I might encounter with a corpse. And after checking my pulse, I decided that I was probably more likely to be on the unexpired list