WC is not the best tint bin?

A poll in another forum led me to research standards for cool vs warm vs neutral light, and subsequently what pure (or perfect, or perfectly neutral, which happens to be very close to sunlight) white is. I found first that it should lie on the black body radiator line, which CREE's WC tint bin does, but second, I found that the color temperature should be around 6000K. CREE's WC tint bin lies between 7000K and 6350K, while the WD tint bin (which also lies on the black body radiator line) includes 6350K to 5700K, almost perfectly centered at perfect white. This was a real surprise to me, because every time I've seen a CREE tint bin advertised in a flashlight, it has been "premium" WC, which is apparently slightly to very cool. As a side note, this makes Dereelight's 5A pills 1000K warmer than true white.

Does anybody have experience with a WD binned CREE? Does it appear as white as my research says it should?

One thing my research does not include is CRI. At 75 typical CRI, none of CREE's cool or neutral (by their definition) LEDs have a good CRI. Might this increase with warm LEDs? And, and this is probably hoping for too much, can anybody explain why? Thanks

Warm Cree has only 80 CRI. 4500-5500K is the best to distinguish colors.

phantom23 said:

Warm Cree has only 80 CRI. 4500-5500K is the best to distinguish colors.

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But that range is included in CREE's LEDs, which produce only 75-80 CRI. Since there are LEDs with 95 CRI (and probably higher that I haven't heard of), I think something besides color temperature goes into it.

I think Gene Malkoff may have used WD bin, or still does. I'd have to double check. I know his drop-ins often have a nice tint, usually a tad warming than the WC. I guess some feel WC looks the brightest, while being one of the closest to white. I also think the WC bin has less variations in tint than other bins.

WadeF said:

I think Gene Malkoff may have used WD bin, or still does. I'd have to double check. I know his drop-ins often have a nice tint, usually a tad warming than the WC. I guess some feel WC looks the brightest, while being one of the closest to white. I also think the WC bin has less variations in tint than other bins.

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That description fits the WD bin very well. And maybe the WC bin does look the brightest... I hadn't really thought about that. But according to CREE, it has exactly the same variation as WD...

My personal favourite bin is a 3A; 5A is too yellow and WC/WG is too blue. Not saying it's the best, though! No experience with a WD, be interesting to try...

As for colour temp, this isn't always linked to CRI! Sodium vapour lamps are nice and warm, but no-one in their right mind would claim they have a good CRI

Jarl said:

My personal favourite bin is a 3A; 5A is too yellow and WC/WG is too blue.

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You must have bad WG because it should be pure white with slight yellow hue (no blue!). 3A/WH is nice indeed.

WadeF said:

I think Gene Malkoff may have used WD bin, or still does. I'd have to double check. I know his drop-ins often have a nice tint, usually a tad warming than the WC. I guess some feel WC looks the brightest, while being one of the closest to white. I also think the WC bin has less variations in tint than other bins.

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Yeah I've been noticing all along that the WC tint leans more towards cool white than neutral white. I haven't come across a WD tint emitter myself yet. Most of Gene's latest dropins have been using the WG tint, which I myself prefer over WC. Most of the Chinese flashlight manufacturers seem to be in love with the WC tint...either that or WC is the most commonly available tint that comes out of Cree's China factory. I think I read somewhere that Kai from Kaidomain prefers the cooler tints, which is why he always only sells WC tinted Crees and SXO tinted SSCP4s. I realize this boils down to preference and there seems to be many who like the "HID look" of the cooler tinted LEDs...I used to think that way until I walked around outside with a cool tinted flashlight on a rainy evening and realized how useless my flashlight was. Then there are those who say stick with an incan for outdoor use and I can understand that too...but I love and prefer LEDs now and I prefer the warmer tints in general. I think the new Cree 5A is suppose to work well outdoors, although I haven't gotten one yet. Also before Lumileds ran into their manufacturing fiasco, they had a warmer tinted TFFC K2 Luxeon that CPF member Photofanatic sold and it has a very nice output.

phantom23 said:

You must have bad WG because it should be pure white with slight yellow hue (no blue!). 3A/WH is nice indeed.

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That's right, WG should be pure white and a twinge of yellow...it's one of favorite Cree tints at the moment next to WH.

I came to the light... said:

Does anybody have experience with a WD binned CREE?

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WD is my favorite tint. Cutter is where I get them. The first ones I ordered were Q5's, and they were just slightly cool. Not very noticeable like a WC. Later, I ordered some R2 WD tint Cree's and half looked like the previous Q5's, and some were definitely WG "looking", greenish. So, when I ordered some more WD's recently, I specified Q5 bin. They're not here yet, but I'm hoping they are like the first batch of WD Q5's I got months ago.

I sometimes mix WD and WG to get the overall tint as white as possible. For instance, I have a penta Cree mag with 4 WD's and 1 WG. The beam is just about pure white with no bias to my eye.


That's the great thing about multi-emitter lights. You can mix/match tints to get what you like.

Excuse my ignorance on this subject but what do the letters mean describing the Cree Leds? For example: WC (white cool), WG (white green?) WD White (D stands for?), WH White (H stands for?).

I prefer the warm tint Leds and have a 5A Q2 which I like, but which other types of Leds are warm tinted?

Thank you.

From what I've been reading and seeing, CRI and tint don't have much to do with each other.

Find a high CRI, and find a tint that you are comfortable with.

From the review pics I've seen I think WH might be the ideal tint. I really hope Dereelight offers the WH R2's again in the future.

Many manufacturers say that WC is premium tint, but after trying some lights with warmer tints like WH or 5A, I have to say that WC is not premium for me.

I did notice my P7 flashlight has a slightly yellower tint to it especially the hotspot, spill is about the same color as my crees, could be that there is just generally more and yellower phosphorus and I noticed that without the reflector yellower light is thrown out the sides. But my question is where approximately on the cree tint scale is your average P7 led?

Axion said:

From the review pics I've seen I think WH might be the ideal tint. I really hope Dereelight offers the WH R2's again in the future.

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+1

I'm really hoping they do.

jirik_cz said:

Many manufacturers say that WC is premium tint, but after trying some lights with warmer tints like WH or 5A, I have to say that WC is not premium for me.

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The only thing I see that is better about WC is that it appears brighter. If you put two lights that are putting out the same lumens side by side, the WC will look brighter. :shrug:

I agree, it isn't premium for me either.

qwertyydude said:

I did notice my P7 flashlight has a slightly yellower tint to it especially the hotspot, spill is about the same color as my crees, could be that there is just generally more and yellower phosphorus and I noticed that without the reflector yellower light is thrown out the sides. But my question is where approximately on the cree tint scale is your average P7 led?

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I've read and noticed that my P7 lights seem to have different tint on the 4 dies. If it's focusable, focus it so you can identify the 4 dies and then look at the color difference between them. If its not focusable, hold it close to something so you can see the 4 dies. One out of four almost has to have one that is going to be a different tint.

Looks like I'm the outlier in this group.

My favorite bin by far is 6A (3500-3800k CCT), followed closely by 5A (4000-4300k CCT, brownish tint), then 3A (5500-5000k, white), then WH (5500-5000k, yellow-greenish), then WD (5500k-6000k, white), then 7A (~3000k, yellow like incan) THEN WC (6300k+)

WC is actually my least favorite bin of all the ones I've used.

The only thing I see that is better about WC is that it appears brighter. If you put two lights that are putting out the same lumens side by side, the WC will look brighter.

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If you reflect it of something white, yes. If you reflect it off of something like a tree -- which reflects a lot of red, green, and yellow wavelengths, but almost completely absorbs blue light, it will appear DIMMER than a "less efficient" warm or neutral emitter, or even compared to a WH bin cool white.

My Q2 5As look brighter outdoors and provide far more useful contrast than my R2 WCs, for example, despite emitting almost 20% fewer lumens/watt.

From what I've been reading and seeing, CRI and tint don't have much to do with each other.

Find a high CRI, and find a tint that you are comfortable with.

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CRI is only valid when comparing lights to each other with the same corellated color temperature. Meaning an incan at 3000k (defined as 100 CRI) will provide better color rendition than a 7A LED with 82 CRI.

You can't legitimately compare a 5000k LED to a 3000k incan on the basis of CRI however.

That's the great thing about multi-emitter lights. You can mix/match tints to get what you like.

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In my opinion an ideal mixture would be the following:

A very cool bin like WC, a warm bin like 6A or 7A, Cyan, and red. The end result should be about 4000k with no spectral deficiency at all. Both the whites should far outweigh the colors.

A poll in another forum led me to research standards for cool vs warm vs neutral light, and subsequently what pure (or perfect, or perfectly neutral, which happens to be very close to sunlight) white is. I found first that it should lie on the black body radiator line, which CREE's WC tint bin does, but second, I found that the color temperature should be around 6000K.

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Simply reproducing the spectrum of sunlight isn't enough unless you also have ridiculously high illuminance, like between 10,000 and 100,000 lux like you'd see during the daytime. In lower lighting conditions, your eye's sensitivity to different colors changes, causing a lower color temperature source to generally be more effective.

If you're lighting 10 sq-meters of footpath with 250 lumens, that's only 25 lux.

I've found that neutral white LED flashlights in the 3600k-4200k range tend to make colors look the most accurate even at relatively low illuminance.

Incans in the 3000k-3600k range tend to improve color contrast, but they are less color accurate. the effect here is similar to wearing blue-blocking sunglasses during the daytime -- color accuracy is traded off for heightened color contrast.

I came to the light... said:

But that range is included in CREE's LEDs, which produce only 75-80 CRI. Since there are LEDs with 95 CRI (and probably higher that I haven't heard of), I think something besides color temperature goes into it.

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What lowers the CRI in the warm Crees is cyan. They don't put out very much of it. But our eyes interpret green and blue together as cyan, so it's not that big a deal. There aren't many items out there that are cyan and not blue+green.

And even with the relatively low cyan output, the brighter Cree LED can reach similar levels of illumination of cyan items as the "high CRI" LEDs.

That said, CRI isn't a perfect measure of light at all.

Anyone who wants to know more about tint bins, there is an excellent sticky topic here:

https://www.candlepowerforums.com/threads/156772

So why is WC considered the superior bin by manufacturers then? It seems like there is no middle ground between WC and the incan-like warm tint bins. My perfect tint would probably be inbetween the 5A (4000-4300k) and the 3A (5500-5000k), so 4A, if that exists.

Why are we stuck with WC then? Its not like the slightly warmer bins are considerably less efficent (to the point of hurting performance values), and most manufacturers are still using Q5 WC's anyhow. Does 5-10 minutes more runtime or a couple more lumens really make up for a nicer tint not to mention a lessened lottery effect from tighter tint bins. I'd think a slightly warmer tint would be preferable in both throwers and EDC sized lights. I know my older M60 certainly has the most pleasing tint out of all my LEDs (it certainly seems like a WD as opposed to my WC Nitecores and my new cooler tinted, even slightly purple, M60F), but in being so it dosen't sacrifice usefullness one bit. So then what makes the WC bin so 'holier than thou' compared to the other bins?

After looking at the tint bins it looks like a Q5 or R2 in WJ tint would be pretty ideal. Good color temp, closer to the black body like then WH. Are these really rare or is there another reason we don't see them more?