A Hypothetical Question Regarding Flashlight Tints

I've been thinking about LED tints quite a bit as of late, and was wonder how people would respond to the following hypothetical question:

Suppose there were two LED flashlight companies, Company A and Company B.

Company A offers two tint options for all of their lights: Cool White @ 6000K and Neutral White @ 4000K.

Company B only offers one tint: something they call "True" Neutral White @ 5000K.

We will assume that both companies produce LED flashlights of comparable form factor, quality, and cost.

If you had to choose only one of these companies to do business with, which one would it be?

Seeing how there wouldn't (IMHO) be any practical difference I would go with the company that had the best customer service unless I really wanted a warmer light. Even then CS might trump that consideration.

I'm not sure. I think my neutral lights have so far been 5000K and 4500K. Not entirely sure of the difference between those. I guess it's cool that A offers choices though.

I find 5000K too cool for my tastes. I'd definitely take a 4000K emitter over the other choices.

I mostly prefer ~4000K tint for my lighting needs, LED flashlights included. So if there could only be one (and all else being the same), I'd have to go with company A.

That said: purchases depend on many factors, LED tint being an important consideration but far from the only one.

I might buy a flashlight from both companies. Indoor flashlight with 4000k, and an outdoor flashlight with 5000k emitter. 5000k looks best outdoors in my experience, as it looks closest to direct sunlight, and 4000k comes off as an incandescent for outdoor use-- not very natural looking.

For indoor use, I'd go with the 4000k, as it's closer to an incandescent and soft white fluorescents that we're accustomed to for indoor use, it looks more natural there.

If I had to choose only one, I'd choose the 5000k company, as 90% of my flashlight use is outdoors.

Since it is all hypothetical and all, I would go with Company B first. Then I would buy all the others too. Then get rid of what I don't like. Which translates that I would own 3 lights.

But really, a more simplistic way I would look at this: You could have one Company offer all 3. Then what would you choose and why?

I like options, but that 5000K is hard to mess with! I could go warmer, but not any cooler than that.

the technically brightest tint that shows no blue
--> 5.000 K

RetroTechie said:

That said: purchases depend on many factors, LED tint being an important consideration but far from the only one.

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Too true. That's why it's so difficult for discriminating flashlight users to find "the one"

When you consider form factor, battery type, tint, beam profile, efficiency, UI, and other features such as tail standing and clip configurations the fraction of flashlights that will satisfy your requirements in every category becomes vanishingly small (in some cases zero). Not that I'm complaining or anything; I think existing flashlight offerings are pretty good and a lot of innovations have come out in the last few years.

I bought three Convoy lights at once and the nice thing about them and FastTech, is that you can choose between more than a few emitters and four different current levels.

For my M1, I went with the 2.8A XM-L U2 1B CW LED, for my M2 I went with the 2.8A board and the XM-L T6 3C NW jobbie and for the S2, I went with a 'rosey' XM-L T5 5C (3700-4000K) @ 2.8A setup, so I got three nice tints covering a wide spectrum.

I'm not really a tint junkie and I have purple tinted Fenix PD32s, seafoam green ZL SC600s and a few other that are in between. The neutral white emitters generally strike a nice balance for me.

Chris

Short answer, I'd go with company A.

long answer, the warmest tint is for me, though I do use cool white at times but more importantly I don't just buy for me, I also buy for friends, family and coworkers. They all pick brightness over tint, which makes me want options.

WalkIntoTheLight said:

I find 5000K too cool for my tastes. I'd definitely take a 4000K emitter over the other choices.

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Same here. 4000k for me. So company A to answer the question.

Need a poll