should my cyan light look green?

I just put a cyan S5JC Lux III in a "Golston", but it looks very green. Is this the way it is supposed to look? I know that cyan ink is a turquoise blue, so that is what I expected. Can anyone reassure me that I actually have a cyan LED instead of a mislabeled green one?

Bernie

the cyan i just put in(q2hc) is greener than i expected. my next color will probably be a royal blue.

If it's any help, my factory made ARC first run LS CYAN always looks green too. Only in direct comparison to a green one do you see that it has some turquoise in it.

Anyone else?


Be lucky....

Cyan is smack dab in the middle of green and blue. I love Cyan....

Nyctophiliac said:

If it's any help, my factory made ARC first run LS CYAN always looks green too. Only in direct comparison to a green one do you see that it has some turquoise in it.

Anyone else?


Be lucky....

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I've had no experience with Cyan Luxes, but from 3 turquoise ArcAAA's I've had I can tell you there is lots of tint variation.

The reason is this: Lumileds sells Cyan luxeons for traffic light manufactures. If you've noticed traffic lights aren't true green or yellow-green. The reason is for color blind people, so they make them that emerald green. So lumileds on purpose makes their cyan this emerald green for traffic lights since traffic lights wouldn't use their straight green.

Keep in mind your eye can make out LOTS of "tints" of green, more than other colors, so there is a lot of variations you can make out.

To get a REAL cyan color, you need ~480nm (argon laser color). You need a bin 1 cyan and drive it HARD. A luxeon1 overdriven will shift more bluer too that's why PSM's Q2H luxeon one overdriven to 800ma looks better.

So yes they are typically greenies. I searched hard to get my cyan that was really cyan and not made for traffic lights

I learned recently that I am a little, color blind. With the old incandescent traffic lights, I could hardly seen the green in the green light and could mix them with any other white light around. With the new LED traffic lights (they retrofitted every traffic lights here). I can now see clearly the green (cyan) one. I noticed, depending of the brand of the LED modules used, that there are some differences in the colors. Some are more green, some are almost blue.

IsaacHayes said:

The reason is this: Lumileds sells Cyan luxeons for traffic light manufactures. If you've noticed traffic lights aren't true green or yellow-green. The reason is for color blind people, so they make them that emerald green. So lumileds on purpose makes their cyan this emerald green for traffic lights since traffic lights wouldn't use their straight green.

Keep in mind your eye can make out LOTS of "tints" of green, more than other colors, so there is a lot of variations you can make out.

To get a REAL cyan color, you need ~480nm (argon laser color). You need a bin 1 cyan and drive it HARD. A luxeon1 overdriven will shift more bluer too that's why PSM's Q2H luxeon one overdriven to 800ma looks better.

So yes they are typically greenies. I searched hard to get my cyan that was really cyan and not made for traffic lights

Click to expand...

IsaacHayes said:

So lumileds on purpose makes their cyan this emerald green for traffic lights since traffic lights wouldn't use their straight green.

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I never knew that. When I run into an incandescent traffic light, I usually notice how much greener it looks. No wonder with cyan LEDs!

Yup. Even incandescent green traffic lights are not the yellow-green color. If they were they would put out more light, but due to color blind people they try to keep them as emerald green as possible. Some old bulbs can look more yellow green in the center though. But with LEDs, you get pure rich color.

You may ask, well why don't they just make their cyan, real cyan, and make their normal green more emerald? Because the straight normal green is used in RGB back lighting etc.

An alternative for getting true cyan luxeons is getting a blue luxeon with a high color bin like 6 and driving it close to spec or a little bit over.

In most of our Traffic Division's new signal LED's there are actually two distinct colors of LED's. A more greenish and a more blueish. These are not color differences in the LED's. Individual LED's of each color are set up in patterns. Maybe a triangle or square. I don't remember. I think the reason is to achieve the correct DOT specified color. Once you're a fair distance away, you can't distinguish between the two different colors and can't see the patterns. I think this might be true for the newer models that have a cover/lens over all the leds. (these look like the old incandescent lamps because you can't see the individual LED's)

IsaacHayes said:

An alternative for getting true cyan luxeons is getting a blue luxeon with a high color bin like 6 and driving it close to spec or a little bit over.

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In the 2006 Doctor Who episode "The Idiot's Lantern," The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver as a torch; nasty cyan tint and very dim by CPF standards. I guess one tool can't do everything well. :shrug: Anyway, since the screwdriver normally glows a deeper blue, I'm guessing it has a blue luxeon that is driven at low levels for the glowing effect, and overdriven for the occasional torch use. I wondered why they used a cyan light, now I know. It was creative use of what was already at hand.

Here's a shot of the S1JC LuxIII IsaacHayes made for me. (~495nm)

The cat crawled into the beam and just laid down at the tail end of a runtime test -- he wouldn't have done it earlier. That light can light up the side of a house at two blocks through the rain!

As mentioned earlier, any voltage sag will drop CYAN right into green. The shift is very dramatic in my Rigel MIL-Starlite Mini.

I also think that individuals may prefer different parts of what is called CYAN -- I love ~495nm!

It looks bluer in picture. The real color of ~520nm (and other) monochromatic light doesn't show up correctly after it goes through CCD->image processor->LCD/CRT. The color on screen vs real light is obviously drastically different.

I know this, because I too have made a Lux III cyan LED light. Can someone suggest a use for it??

meep. cyan looks cyan while blue looks blue on my screen.

just that you really need to do some tuning of colours.

the tint bin of the led will determine how cyan the led is, doesn't it?

Here's an graphic IsaacHayes put up in another thread (with a wavelength notation added by myself):

Sub_Umbra said:

Here's a shot of the S1JC LuxIII IsaacHayes made for me. (~495nm)

The cat crawled into the beam and just laid down at the tail end of a runtime test -- he wouldn't have done it earlier. That light can light up the side of a house at two blocks through the rain!

As mentioned earlier, any voltage sag will drop CYAN right into green. The shift is very dramatic in my Rigel MIL-Starlite Mini.

I also think that individuals may prefer different parts of what is called CYAN -- I love ~495nm!

Click to expand...

Glad to know that my Rigel MIL-Starlite is "normal". When it's full bright, it's the coolest color of light! It seems really surprising that it's so difficult to get led's to make stead color instead of drifting so much with different power inputs.

Cyan (blue green) LEDs are made more greenish on purpose.
They used to make them with a wavelength range of approximately 485nm to 495nm and it was called Tokyo Blue; traffic light manufacturers (the largest user of these LEDs) wanted the wavelength bumped up by 10nm or 15nm; this way, the "green" signals would still look green, but contain enough blue to be visible to somebody with red/green color blindness.

So yes, the most commonly available cyan LEDs (standard and high-powered) will have more of a greenish hue to them than they used to. That is, their wavelength range is now ~500nm to ~510nm.

Sub, yup, just like green there are different shades of cyan. I like the cyan that is almost sky blue in color, much like the light blue cyan used in printing. The 495nm you have is a pretty color too, like turquoise or something. Even just a couple nm's can make the color a lot different looking to your eyes, so there are a lot of colors to be had. EDIT: I forgot about that graphic. It looks like I need to shift the colors because the bin2 actually looks like your bin1 more from what I remember, and it seems you agree as you put the wavelength on that color too.

Hand, yes typically photos of cyan light make them look more blue. In the case of a typical luxeon cyan, they make them appear truely cyan when in real life they are more emerald traffic light green. I try to adjust my photos I had of my cyan light in photoshop to make sure they looked accurate. I had my cyan next to a royal blue light and took the photo, and it still looked cyan. I bet with a typical greenish cyan, that it would look green... Cyan light is very bright to your eyes. My cyan light (true real cyan) looks brighter than my U-bin mag. So it's really a bright, eerie color. And if you're eyes adjust to it, after a while it seems like white light as you can start to make out what is red/blue/etc. Orange plastics fluoresce brightly under it (and also green light).

chester, yes see above about the cameras. A cyan with a color bin of 1 will be more towards cyan, and a tint of say 5 will be extreeeemly green.

There is a only a few of us in the "true cyan" luxeon color club.

Hmmm. My LuxV looks like the bin 2 color but Sub_Umbra's looks bluer and PSM's looks bluer still. This was the first reported single LED flashlight breaking 10,000 Lux at 12,720 Lux. I wonder how hard I can drive it. Maybe 7AA? I ask because when the batts start to get low it turns greener but is still very bright.

Isaac, I had 4sevens install one of Photonfanatic's "to die for" cyan's (LXHL - PE01 - Bin Code Q2h) in my Fenix L1p. IIRC, the Fenix drives at 350 ma. So I can get an idea of where this light fits in, can you tell me if my color is more green, more blue or about the same as your "true cyan"? Could you provide nm numbers to help illustrate the difference?