I see there's some concern here around the relative cool white tint of the new XP-G2 (XP-G Gen 2) emitters used by Foursevens.
I have just received a pair of XP-G2 equipped lights for a review (what can I say, it takes awhile for snail mail to reach us up here in Canada
). I am afraid it will be a few weeks before I can get full reviews done, as I will be away most of the next couple of weeks.
But I wanted to reassure folks here that my two samples are perfectly normal cool white tints. I would rate both as on the cooler end of "cool white", one with a slight pinkish hue. Both are perfectly acceptable as standard cool white.
Photographing beam tints is not a trivial task. I have discussed some of the issues in this earlier Foursevens comparison. To put it simply, your eye and brain do a lot of dynamic processing for normalizing white balance - a camera is limited to single specific color temperature.
Choosing the "right" color temp setting for the camera is not simple, as most only have a limited set of options. Actually, it is more like "right" is not possible at all for comparing beam tints - how do you choose one temperature to compare one or more lights of differing (but highly specific) individual color temperatures? One (or more) lights is likely to lose out in that comparison, due to arbitrariness of whatever reference white balance you choose for the camera.
One way around this is to compare a wide number of lights simultaneously, and let the camera "auto" choose the best overall composite WB. In practice, I find this the simplest solution.
For the picks below, I grabbed a dozen random XP-G lights from my collection that take 14500 or RCR, and set them in groups of four with my two XP-G2 review samples. In each case, the XP-G2 lights are in the middle of each row. All lights on max.
Again, I did no pre-selection for tints in the comparator lights - they are literally just the first ones I grabbed. I think you will see that the XP-G2 lights are well within a normal range for "cool white".
That said, they do seem to toward the cooler end of the acceptable "cool white" range (i.e., it has historically been more common to find yellow or green tinted samples, as you can likely see in the comparator XP-G samples above).
For those who are worried that these lights are "blue", here's a comparison to some true blue-tints: a handful of 5mm keychain lights.
Clearly, the Foursevens XP-G2 are not "blue" in the traditional sense. Note that for this comparison, I ran the Foursevens samples on Lo to better match output. This led to some slight warm tint-shifting (common on current-controlled lights, as they are being run at lower currents). The auto WB also had more difficulty with the range of tints here (i.e., all four of the 5mm seem blue in real life, but some have a fair amount of yellow as well - which seems be preferentially picked up by the auto WB here). :shrug:
Long story short, my two XP-G2 samples are within the acceptable range of standard "cool white" emitters, although both are toward the cooler end of that spectrum.
You will have to be patient for a few weeks while I work on the full reviews in-between other commitments. :wave:
I have just received a pair of XP-G2 equipped lights for a review (what can I say, it takes awhile for snail mail to reach us up here in Canada
). I am afraid it will be a few weeks before I can get full reviews done, as I will be away most of the next couple of weeks.But I wanted to reassure folks here that my two samples are perfectly normal cool white tints. I would rate both as on the cooler end of "cool white", one with a slight pinkish hue. Both are perfectly acceptable as standard cool white.
Photographing beam tints is not a trivial task. I have discussed some of the issues in this earlier Foursevens comparison. To put it simply, your eye and brain do a lot of dynamic processing for normalizing white balance - a camera is limited to single specific color temperature.
Choosing the "right" color temp setting for the camera is not simple, as most only have a limited set of options. Actually, it is more like "right" is not possible at all for comparing beam tints - how do you choose one temperature to compare one or more lights of differing (but highly specific) individual color temperatures? One (or more) lights is likely to lose out in that comparison, due to arbitrariness of whatever reference white balance you choose for the camera.
One way around this is to compare a wide number of lights simultaneously, and let the camera "auto" choose the best overall composite WB. In practice, I find this the simplest solution.
For the picks below, I grabbed a dozen random XP-G lights from my collection that take 14500 or RCR, and set them in groups of four with my two XP-G2 review samples. In each case, the XP-G2 lights are in the middle of each row. All lights on max.
Again, I did no pre-selection for tints in the comparator lights - they are literally just the first ones I grabbed. I think you will see that the XP-G2 lights are well within a normal range for "cool white".
That said, they do seem to toward the cooler end of the acceptable "cool white" range (i.e., it has historically been more common to find yellow or green tinted samples, as you can likely see in the comparator XP-G samples above).
For those who are worried that these lights are "blue", here's a comparison to some true blue-tints: a handful of 5mm keychain lights.
Clearly, the Foursevens XP-G2 are not "blue" in the traditional sense. Note that for this comparison, I ran the Foursevens samples on Lo to better match output. This led to some slight warm tint-shifting (common on current-controlled lights, as they are being run at lower currents). The auto WB also had more difficulty with the range of tints here (i.e., all four of the 5mm seem blue in real life, but some have a fair amount of yellow as well - which seems be preferentially picked up by the auto WB here). :shrug:
Long story short, my two XP-G2 samples are within the acceptable range of standard "cool white" emitters, although both are toward the cooler end of that spectrum.
You will have to be patient for a few weeks while I work on the full reviews in-between other commitments. :wave:
