Anyone still into COOL TINT leds?

In the past few months or so, I've seen a huge shift to neutral and warm LEDs. I'm just wondering if any of you still prefer cool tints?

Prefer? No. But I tolerate them when I need maximum lumens. For generic purposes, I prefer neutral tints.

Also, if cool is on the blue side, that is much more tolerable than green tints.

The problem is there is a large range of tints and color temperatures in each general category, so it's hard to pin down.

I don't know that I would say I'm "into them", but the LED in the V10r, TCR2, TK35, and SC600 would all fall into the cool range, and I have found them all acceptable, even though I'm buying the Warm or Neutral tints when they are available.

The CREE xp-g HCRI though in the 3K range is too warm for me; BUT not because of the temp per say, I love the look of it indoors, but I found outdoors at night when I expected it to really shine it was not very good at all. To me it seemed to be missing spectrum. It's the only warm, let alone HCRI, that I've found better indoors than out. Don't know what to make of this discovery yet.

Me. I hate warm LEDS, so I'm happy to get the nice icy cool ones...

Yup, I do; I'd be more inclined to neutral if it meant any one thing, but depending on which manufacturer you're buying from, it could be anywhere from 4000 to 6000K. I would prefer a tint that's closest to pure white in most situations/near 6000K, but the majority of builders are defining neutral as "resembles a bright incandescent"..

I have to agree with StarHalo, I would rather cooler LEDs than anything that looks yellow.
Norm

I'm still a cool tint guy but not too cool. I can't stand warm tint LEDs in flashlights. Neutral tints are borderline for me.

Gotta have cool for maximum lumens and wow factor. Neutral (for me is a little yellow) is easier on the eyes though for night walks. Warm=fugettaboutit! Hate sick orange and won't stand for any green at all-that's the most disagreeable.

Rich

I'll buy cool-white as gifts.
I just gifted a JetBeam BC20, it was blue compared with an old Fenix L2D rb100, which itself is somewhat cool-ish compared with real neutral-whites.

My everyday lights are all either High CRI or neutral but I don't mind cool white ONLY IF it's the purest of white with no green in it.

I would rather have a cool over a warm but I like neutral over all. 6500k is a little too cool for me. 3000k is way to warm for me. I like about 4000k to 4500k.

The vast majority of my lights are neutral but I'll buy a cool when a "gotta have it" light is only available in cool (like the SC600). I'll never buy a warm.

In general I like cool white (not green or too blue). Warm or neutral is supposed to be great for outdoors but not for me.

In doors they may be OK only because they resemble incandescent but I don't really use flashlights indoors all that often. If there is a power outage any light is fine anyway.

I find warms annoying and a neutral close to the cool range is OK under circumstances.

There are other things that matter far more to me that finding a tint better than cool white such as lack of artifacts, etc.

I guess I am a flashaholic weirdo.

Somedays I grab a warm light, other days I grab a neutral, sometimes I grab a cool.

I love em all, warm, cool, and everything in-between!!

I love a creamy white light, so I guess im more in a neutral area. I love the beam on my backup and lx2..very soft white

I recently bought a neutral drop-in (Veleno E-series drop-in) and I promptly returned it. Initially I thought it had a warm emitter in it, but, it's neutral. It was too warm for my tastes. BITD, when incans were king, a warm tint meant that it was time to put new batteries into my light and I just could not shake that feeling when using that neutral drop-in. My lights range from about 5500K to 6500K and the cool tint does not bother me one bit. Heck, even greenish tints don't bother me. It's when it goes into the warm/neutral/HCRI side that it starts to bug me.

I usually can't tell if a cool light is cool until I compare it with warm lights. Side by side I clearly see that warm lights like my new high-CRI XP-G (3000K IIRC) are much nicer than my cools IMO, but it doesn't turn me off of cools when not compared directly. But then there's the output thing with cool tints. Overall right now I'd buy a warm/neutral over a cool if theyre the same otherwise, but that's mostly because most of my lights currently are cool.

PoliceScannerMan said:

I guess I am a flashaholic weirdo.

Somedays I grab a warm light, other days I grab a neutral, sometimes I grab a cool.

I love em all, warm, cool, and everything in-between!!

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Same here. I like the cool/white, no blue or green tints. I still like incan lights, and if I want to use one, I just use a real incan bulb - like in the old days. They come from my large supply of many, many OEM dropins that have been removed for LED models to go in.

Overall I like the tint of Cree neutral whites when looking at widely available LED lights but something closer to 5000k would probably be even better to my eyes (the neutral whites tend to cover a broad range). I'm not buying anything with cool white anymore though and I hope to see a lot of high CRI options creep in to the 4500-5500 range.

StarHalo said:

Yup, I do; I'd be more inclined to neutral if it meant any one thing, but depending on which manufacturer you're buying from, it could be anywhere from 4000 to 6000K. I would prefer a tint that's closest to pure white in most situations/near 6000K, but the majority of builders are defining neutral as "resembles a bright incandescent"..

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Pure white doesn't really mean anything.

Yep, me

When I grab a flashlight, 99% of the time it's because I need or want light, not color. Therefore I buy cool.

Even though the lumens difference shouldn't be noticeable "they" say, I really can't see as well with warm tints, despite the better color rendering. I do prefer the "white" side of cool over the blue side however - maybe 5500-6000.