I know very little about Future Electronics and they may indeed have a huge pile of reb 100's. However, while researching the whole LOD reb100 scenario, I've been told by a respected (by cpf members) source that the 100's are difficult to procure and that there is a flood of rebel 80's in the market that have been relabled 100's. If so, that might explain the sudden explosion of chinese "reb 100" lights and fenix's reluctance to go all 100. Is it possible for those of you who have purcased rebel 100 emitters to verify through testing that you actually have 100's and not 80's? I'm not tech savvy enough to know.
edit: Further clarification from the respected one - 100's can be had but in small quantities there's little guarantee on tint - basically a crap shoot. The favored tints must be channeled to the big orders. Minimum order approximately 10,000 units required to guarantee tint. All that said, Fenix was able to procure 100's for their "Premium" lights so it looks like it was a design decision to use 80's only in the LOD.
Hi Shakey,
Future Electronics is not just a dealer they are THE dealer[listed as the exclusive Lumiled distributor]. When you click on a direct-buy link at the Lumiled site, it sends you right over to Future. Not sure if Future's agreement with Lumiled only holds for the U.S. or if it is worldwide, but there is no doubt that most if not all of the Rebels out there were purchased from Future.
Future is a REAL electronics distributor, the kind used to supply parts by the thousands not only for large consumer electronics applications, but for Aerospace, Medical and other critical applications.
As far as the color binning goes, it is correct that you have to order a full reel of parts or more to start talking about specifying your color BIN. On small quantity orders you do have to take pot luck on the color BIN, but they are set up for lot tracking and do provide the lot and color BIN info for every order, so you know what you are getting [and what I have been getting has been VERY GOOD on color]
As far as availability goes, I have run into issues with searching for the exact text 'Rebel 100' on Future's web store, but anyone smart enough to pound sand, will figure out, as I did, that you just need to search by the Rebel 100 part number, and BINGO!, there they are every time!
I have been checking every few weeks and the inventories have gone up and down, but I haven't seen them completely out of stock (I thought they were at one point, but that was just the above search issue).
So in simple terms you have been given half truths.
1. If you order Rebel-100's from Future you
GET Rebel-100's
2. They are NOT hard to get, you just have to be willing to PAY for them.
3. The color bins I have gotten have all been very nice, and the color bins reported by others also seem to be very good.
Sure there are going to be color BIN variations [that's why they have color bins in the first place] but with the Rebels the binning seems to run from neutral to slightly warm, where with the CREE's it has run from neutral to crap-blue.
In any case, with all or nearly all Rebel-100's getting reports that are very complementary about the color, it would be the height of hypocrisy for Fenix to use this as an excuse. My 15 dollar KaiDomain CREE has color about 50 times better than one of my friends Fenix 'CREE edition' wonders, so since when did Fenix become the holy color guardians of the universe?
I have no doubt that your source told you that you have to order 10's of thousands of Rebels to get the terms you want about price, color binning, etc. because that always been the case for any part from any distributor.
Here's an interesting thought. Given that you have to order these huge quantities of a specific part to get the terms you want, why would Fenix double it's problems in this regard by trying to split it's big order between two types.
Answer? You wouldn't, you would standardize on ONE type.
You were the one Shakey that told me that the official Fenix story was that there wasn't all that much difference between Rebel 80's and Rebel 100's and I told you that this was hogwash, a rebel 100 would be a 25% boost from a Rebel 80 (80 * 1.25 = 100).
- But maybe you were right after all, because maybe Fenix knows something that we don't.
What if, say, you want to get a better deal by making one large order instead of a bunch of smaller orders.
Suddenly you have a brainstorm! :thinking:
Rebel 90's near the
top of their power bin are
almost Rebel 100's! :naughty:
Rebel 90's near the
bottom of their power bin are
almost Rebel 80's! :naughty:
And they
aren't even marked, so who can even tell the difference!
If you only take the top few percent of the Rebel 90's and call them Rebel 100's, you would only be ripping them off a little bit. :devil:
Of course that would mean you could only have a very limited number of "premium 100's" (Gee, who do we know that is claiming that they have only VERY limited supplies of 'premium 100' emitters, when clearly you can buy all the
REAL Rebel-100's you want?).
Of course this is all Bull$#IT, we don't even know that Fenix has ever ordered any Rebel 90's do we?
I guess we do . . .
http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2146348&postcount=61
I have no doubt that some of the DX lights out there labeled Rebel 100 could be Rebel 80's. On the other hand, in fairness to DX, some here on CPF have reported that those cheap 18 dollar lights are brighter than ANY of their Fenix CREE lights, so who knows?
In any case, I can't really say what's happening one way or the other, but if I were you, based on the above comments by 4sevens, it would not be DX I would be worrying about playing games, it would be Fenix.
;a con :scowl: ;an insult to our collective intelligence 
