economical beam smoother for lights with ringy beams

i don't know if this has been suggested before, but i thought i'd just mention it anyway. a few days ago i experimented with sticking some scotch satin tape on my arc aaa and uke sl4, and the beam-smoothing and beam-spreading abilities were superb. the usual beam of the arc which had a blueish hotspot with a yellow-ish corona became perfectly even in colour, without any rings, but it changed the beam of my sl4 to a floodlight so i removed the tape.

anyway, i decided to try sticking a single layer of tape on the bulb of my 3D maglite, and it works nicely. the beam is no longer ringy, and is almost on par with a surefire beam. its still as yellow as ever and the light output is reduced slightly (not really noticeable), but the improved beam quality more than makes up for it IMO. i think this works nicely as a cheap alternative to using writeright on the lens of the light

Where can you get Scotch Satin Tape? Can't find it at Popular.

update:

i just tried this "mod" on my UKE SL4, and it screwed up....basically the bulb gets hot enough to melt the tape, and the plastic becomes clear again, and so you'll be back to a ringy beam with reduced light output

it works fine for the maglite though....since the bulb doesn't burn as hot but watch out if you're using a xenon bulb of some sort.

i've no idea....i happened to have it lying around in a drawer. i'm not sure if its called "satin tape" in singapore, but its basically scotch tape that looks fogged up

How does it look like (the cover, if it's still there) How fogged up? How many PSI? (As in for air quality)

Something that needs to be stressed for new users of the Scotch satin tape treatment is that satin tape does not have the low tack adhesive found on the Writeright PDA screen covers. Once it has been sitting on your lens and heated for a while, it will be a pain in the a$$ to remove from the lens.

I had applied satin tape to some of my lenses because I couldn't find WriteRight in my area. I later found some WriteRight at a local K-Mart, and tried to remove the satin tape.

I would suggest buying GooGone or some other glue remover for that purpose.

That being said, having tried both methods, I found that the WriteRight lets out a little more light, while the satin tape shapes a nicer circular beam pattern versus WriteRight's 'cross' pattern.