What ever happened to the Rebel lights?

They seem to have died off. Is Lumileds unable to produce them in any useful quantity? Is the performance so far behind everything else on the market? Did horrible reliability issues send them to an early grave?

I've got one light with a Rebel 100 in it, and I love the tint and the quality of the beam. I wish I could buy more lights like it. Why did Fenix cancel its line of Rebel lights?

www.eliteled.com still have some Fenix R100 lights in stock.

The rebel 100 turned out to be faulty. After Lumileds found the fault, they apparently weren't able - or willing - to produce enough fault-free rebel 100s to satisfy demand (if they even went back to producing them, I'm not sure).
Rebel 80s are still sold, but their efficiency is lower than Crees and SSCs, so they don't get used much.

With the release of the Cree XP-E in high bins up to R2, there is absolutely no reason to care about Rebels anymore.


But to answer your question, I think it was all of the above.

XP-E? What's that?

I still use my Fenix P3D R100, it has a beautiful smooth beam with a great warm tint.
I have no reason to update it, 150 real lumens are enough for me.

If it will be faulty... I will change it...

Fallingwater said:

XP-E? What's that?

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Basically a shrunk XR-E with no metal ring, with a footprint smaller than a Rebel.

https://www.candlepowerforums.com/threads/204595

https://www.candlepowerforums.com/threads/216473

Fallingwater said:

XP-E? What's that?

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XP-E = Flashaholics dream come true.

In tests Cree was able to get 173 lumens at 350mA, but I don't know how many of the production ones will be capable of that. That's a good 50% jump from where they are now with XR-E R2's.

The XP-E will have a floodier beam from what I understand which means it will be more like a rebel, ssc, which should mean a much better beam when used in reflector based lights. The emitter surface may also be smaller, but I'm not sure. If that would be the case they may throw better too.

The XP-E Cree got 173 lumens at also had a warmer color temp, I think it was around 4300k, but don't quote me. With the XR-E's they have R2 bins in the cool white, but so far we've only seen Q3 bins in the neutral white. So hopefully we'll see XP-E's that are warm and more efficient than the current XR-E's, all with a cleaner beam. :twothumbs:

The only bummer is if they turn out to be as good as we hope we'll want them in all our existing XR-E based lights.

Scott should just go ahead and buy a whole reel of them.

I need 8 lights swapped over!

Yeah, Milky could be busy upgrading a lot of flashlights.

I'm still amazed at the big leaps they are making with LED's. Just when it looks like they maybe hitting a wall, they break through. I guess we'll have to wait and see what XP-E bins are available to the market to see just how big of a breakthrough they really make.

WadeF said:

The XP-E Cree got 173 lumens at also had a warmer color temp, I think it was around 4300k, but don't quote me. With the XR-E's they have R2 bins in the cool white, but so far we've only seen Q3 bins in the neutral white. So hopefully we'll see XP-E's that are warm and more efficient than the current XR-E's, all with a cleaner beam. :twothumbs:

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Both XP-E and XR-E use the same die. There is no difference in their output. That lab record wasn't XP-E specific...

XP-E have one downside. Maximum driving current is only 700mA, probably because of higher thermal resistance of the packaging.

Oops, my bad:

"Cree's tests confirmed that the 1mm x 1mm LED produced 173 lumens of light output and achieved 161 lumens per watt efficacy at a color temperature of 4689K. The tests were conducted under standard LED test conditions at a drive current of 350mA, at room temperature. "

I'm not at all happy about the warm tint thing (being one of the tiny minority who actually prefer bluish white), but I'm very happy that they have basically reworked the XR-E and it's now without the ring and the large dome.

Only bad thing I can think of, it's gonna be harder to mount them correctly.

A few questions:

1) since the die is the same I presume driving current is the same, i.e. 700mA or so at full power, right?
2) since they've done away with the ring+lens assembly, does this mean the XP-E has a lambertian light pattern such as the SSC/Lux/Rebel? That would be very good, because it'd mean we flood lovers wouldn't have to swap SSCs all over the place (though I guess the people at SSC wouldn't be very happy about this)...
3) If 2 is true, I presume they're going to keep manufacturing the XR-E for throwy lights, right?

Personally I'm not a fan of the XP-E. It's going to be tricky to solder to, and I don't like using PCB's :/

What was the fault with the Rebel?

Tainted phosphor

And inability to produce bins efficient enough to compete with Cree and SSC

Marduke said:

And inability to produce bins efficient enough to compete with Cree and SSC

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But not defective, right?

Chewy said:

But not defective, right?

Click to expand...

They did have a recall on a number of lots because of defective LED's.

When I first started getting interested in high performance LED's, the defective Rebels were being talked about. Because of that, I've avoided anything and everything with a Rebel emitter. . . .