What tasks require good color rendition?

I am a closet flashaholic. I was always intrigued by flashlights, ever since boy scouts. Now this forum has taken me from intrigue to obsession. I have been here for a little over a month, and I have acquired and inova X1, X5, XO2, Lumapower M1, and Fenix L0D-CE and L2D-CE. Help me!

On to my question. What tasks requre good color rendition? Do I need an incandescent in my collection? It seems like LEDs give the runtime and brightness for my needs. Everytime I see the incan vs LED debate, folks talk about the better color rendition of incandescent lights. From my perspective, I don't need to know what color the coffee table is, I just need to see it so I don't bang my shin on it. What might I need to do that will require good color rendition?

Greetings!

It's more than just seeing the "correct" color like the example you brought up with the coffee table. Incandescent lights actually add DEPTH to outdoor scenes, due to the way the eye interprets color and shadow. At least that's been my experience.

Best wishes,
Bawko

better color rendition usually just help you see easier
like making out details and such

For the nightime trips to the bathroom or maybe the kitchen many LEDs will be just fine. I have found several situations while on patrol that require color rendition.......

Approaching a vehicle on a traffic stop where the windows may be lightly tinted and I need to clearly pick out fine details of the persons inside. I would hate to discharge my weapon at a person in the vehicle reaching for a cell phone however have found that many times while a nice luxeon may "look" crisper or more clear it is actually not.

I have found that also in smoky or musky environments such as an old warehouse color rendition comes into play greatly when searching for intruders. It is often very difficult to pick out very fine details or movement without color rendition involved and for patrol work color rendition is crucial.

I once thought because of the very "white" look of better tinted luxeons that I was seeing colors more vivid however after years of playing with lights I was wrong....incandescents are vital for color rendition and police work where color rendition is often needed.

I think all this fuss in color showing is just one of the last attempts of ppl not wanting a led based light.

MAYBE some years in the past, with just ugly 5mm emitters, the light offered was bad,
but now, with actual emitters driven hard to give more light than even very good, powerful and expensive incans (but still running considerably longer than these), this has changed.
Its so much white light by now, that its plain no longer true.
And then compare the package size!

Tracking a blood trail (while hunting, nothing exiting) with a led is quite difficult. Even with hid it's not much better. One can see blood on the ground with incandescent light much better.

Yellow believe me when I say I once badly wanted to believe that the cooler looking light of luxeons was better however after years of actual hands on experience I found that this is simply not the case.

In a cloudy or smoky environment coupled with stress and several other factors there is simply nothing that will compare to a better powered incandescent such as SureFire or Wolf-Eyes....or any incandescent for that matter........trust me I have been there and this is why I have went back to an incandescent as a main light with a better quality luxeon (TW4) as a back up only light.

I had to really experience it to believe it as I was so sure the better "looking" light from several of my Luxeons must be better....I was very wrong and it took much to convince me however it is the way it is.

It depends upon how you use your lights. I am involved in a number of volunteer emergency services in our area, including some that involve search and rescue. While I use both types of lights depending upon the search environment, the incans usually get the nod as I don't want to miss even the smallest detail that a LED light might not show as clearly.

I'm (mostly) with Robocop on this one. "White" light isn't always the best to see everything, especially with LEDs, as white is generally ever-so-slightly blue, even with Luxeon I, III V, K2 and Seoul (don't own a cree so I can't comment, but I assume the same). There are some situations where incandescent is truly the way to go. I've personally found that most incandescents work better in smoke because they throw better (which has mostly been the trend of all incandescent lights when compared to LEDs) but some LEDs work very, very well in smoke. U-04 Barbolight comes to mind, as does the Aleph III. I've used both and been right there with the incan guys..

nimhpwr, I've personally found that blue light (no matter what the source) works best for blood tracking. Blue light + red blood = black spots.

GreySave, what kind of SAR are you doing?? I can think of only one time where I used an incandescent on an active search. Details please!!

yellow said:

I think all this fuss in color showing is just one of the last attempts of ppl not wanting a led based light.
...
Its so much white light by now, that its plain no longer true.
And then compare the package size!

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(emphasis mine)

I'm a self-proclaimed "LED guy" (so no excuses here), and even I appreciate the virtues of an incan light. Some of their advantages have already been mentioned, and you simply can't get as much light out of a small package from an incan. For the most part, LED's rule. :nana:

LED light shortcomings at color rendition comes exactly because it's white light - our eyes are used to yellowish tints, as oposed to "cool" white light most common in LED sources.

Anyway, another specialized used where you need good color rendition is in dental examinations (I assume in medical exams as well), where slight differences in tissue coloration may indicate a problem.

LED light shortcomings at color rendition comes exactly because it's white light - our eyes are used to yellowish tints, as oposed to "cool" white light most common in LED sources.

Click to expand...

LED has faults in color renditoin, but it's not because eyes only work well with yellowish light. The Sun (~4000-5000K at most times of day), indirect sky light (8000K+), and the moon (4200K) are all neutral or cool white. While our eyes do see well by flames and incandescent filaments (2700-3000K) as well, that doesn't make cool white sources inherently bad for color rendering.

In a cloudy or smoky environment coupled with stress and several other factors there is simply nothing that will compare to a better powered incandescent such as SureFire or Wolf-Eyes....or any incandescent for that matter........trust me I have been there and this is why I have went back to an incandescent as a main light with a better quality luxeon (TW4) as a back up only light.

Click to expand...

The issue of fog has to do with Rayleigh Scattering -- the fact that shorter wavelengths of light (blue) scatter a lot more due to moisture in the atmosphere. The strong blue component of the LEDs gets reflected right back, obscuring what you're trying to observe. Vehicle fog lights actually have amber filters on them in many cases for this reason. I'd be interested in seeing how one of Cree's 3000K warm white LEDs would perform in the fog.

Personally, I thnk that LED will within the next few years almost match incandescent for color rendering. As the emitters start to get more efficient, there will be a big push to use them in fixed lighting applications -- which will require higher color rendering in a wider range of color temperatures (3000K/warm, 4000K/neutral etc). Right now white LEDs are mainly being used in flashlights, or backlights for small LCD screens. Using two phosphors to improve the strength of the red is really all that's needed -- pointing a red 5mm LED at a target already illuminated by my best Cree is enough to dramatically improve the color rendering.

Incandescents do provide "richer" looking colors at night because of their more complete spectra; but for me, there is no application where the other advantages of LEDs (amount of light and run time per size/weight of light, operational reliability, ruggedness, bulbs last forever, etc.) do not heavily outweigh that one advantage of incans. I do not do oil paintings at night by flashlight, but maybe you do...

BTW, I've talked with solid state device engineers and they tell me that work is being done on multiple doping of LED substrates to generate true full spectrum white light with no phosphors in future LEDs. Coupled with nano-porosity of LED surfaces to channel the photons out (or some words to that effect), this could provide very bright, very efficient future "full color" LEDs, which mean we would all be selling off our Cree's to buy those things.

This is lab stuff and he didn't know when it might become real (adequate, sustainable yields, capital investment, and so on), but some day...

If you were a boyscout then I would think incandescents would be good for:

1- Seeing better in fog, smoke
2- Better color for injuries.
3- Used by aviation to spot for any cracks, defects, or potential problems because color rendition will show it better.

I would consider carry both if you are in nowhere land for safety, and LED's are fine for EDC.

I used a LED light to spot hibernating bats. The bats are usually brown in color (fur) and many bat hibernation locations are built of either concrete or reddish-brown brick. I found that a LED light provides a better color contrast between the brown color of the bat and brick color than an incandescant (which makes everything look more uniformly yellowish). In my experience, LEDs can be very white and show hardly any color shift, while incandescents are typically only white and bright for the first hour or so.

What tasks require good color rendition?

Graphic design and sign making. A friend of mine had to get his computer monitors calibrated, and replaced all the cheap fluro tubes in the production area because clients were complaining the colours were off.

I use Led Lights for working on electronic devices, color coding of cables, components

For me I don't think the problem lies within the color rendition or the kelvin temperature but rather the brightness used. With a brighter source of light, it provides a better understanding of what you are seeing.

I notice the cockroaches scatter much faster when hit with a SSC-P4 than a Streamlight Stinger. I can sure make out the black widow spiders easily with the SSC-P4 though.

If you want extremes, I remember a time when I was a parking lot attendant in Long Beach when they first switched away from mercury vapor lights to low pressure sodium. The l.p.s. give off a monochromatic orange light. So many people couldn't find where they parked their cars because the car colors all looked dramatically different from their daytime colors. I'd try to ask them what color their car was, then tell them to look for their car as this other color (orange looks orange, white looks orange, green looks black, etc.) Nobody understood what I was talking about.

I remember as a kid finding a large delivery bay on Eglin AFB that was nothing but lps lights. It was like the world turned black and white. Very freaky!

As for a task requiring color rendition..does anyone remember the ending of The Abyss? (granted thats not really led vs incan)

The issue is not whether "white" light is better at colours, it is whether the white is made up of the complete colour spectrum. In LED's the white is made up by mixing the two ends of the colour spectrum, with a dip in the middle colours (frequencies). Some of the reviewers not only show the colour temperature (overall colour) but the whole spectral analysis.
The data sheets for most LED's also have a rating for colour rendition.
Greg