Tint deviation question

Could someone explain tint deviation to me please. I'm looking at a new light around 5000 K but it says it has three steps of tint deviation. Or I can get the 5700 K with no deviation. I prefer a pure white light around 5000 K but if the deviation is going to make it look green I may prefer to go with the 5700 K which is still low enough that it doesn't look blue I suppose.


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I think you may need to provide additional details.

Are you referring to MacAdam ellipses ?

What are the exact emitters and bin codes ?

I assume you're looking at Zebralights, as they're the only company that lists McAdam ellipses for an led.

Essentially they're just referring to how far the circle of tolerance is for an led's tint and cct to be allowed to its reference target.

You can break color down in two major ways:

One is blue to red balance, or how cold or warm the led is. Higher numbers are cooler and lower numbers are warmer. Midday sunlight is 5700k, for instance, while an indoor halogen is 3200k.

The other is green to magenta balance, or the tint of the light as it refers to a pure white neutral line as dictated by a reference black body. Anything shown above the line will have a green tint, while anything below that line will be magenta tinted. The further above or below they are the more extreme the tint deviation. Midday sunlight is slightly green, while an old incandescent is perfectly neutral.

The larger the number for a McAdam ellipse, the larger its circle, so there's more allowance for an emitter to be either greener, pinker, colder, or warmer than its reference target. The smaller the number, the smaller the allowance.

I didn't know that, thank you.
Glad I popped into this thread.
P

Then there is the often overlooked part that different people see different colors differently.

5000K to me, I see as bluish. I also have a 5700K (Olight X7 Marauder) that I consider blue. My Surefire P3X is blue, P2X is slightly green, Malkoffs that are 4000K ranging from slightly magenta, to creamy white, to almost yellow.

The thing is, all of these tints are acceptable to me when I am not comparing them side by side with each other. That can drive a person insane.

So, I personally consider other things than just tint when buying a light because the degrees in Kelvin tells very little as explained above by twistedraven.

Ace12 said:

I prefer a... light around 5000 K

Click to expand...

tint deviation is not relevant to your goal of buying a 5000k light. Buy the color temperature you want.

whether the 5000k will look green or blue to you, depends on whether your brain is adapted to sunlight, or incandescent.

a 5000k light will definitely look blue (cooler) compared to incandescent (3200k), but it will not look blue compared to sunlight (5700k).

green tint from the 5000k will be very obvious, compared to incandescent (3200k), but it will not look as green compared to sunlight (5700k).

As Twistederaven explained so well, Sunlight has more green in it than incandescent

twistedraven said:

Midday sunlight is slightly green

Click to expand...

Our Brain's perception of flashlight Color, and Tint, changes, based on the ambient light our brain is adapted to, at the time when we turn on the flashlight. It takes our brain 30 minutes to change its White Balance in relation to the ambient light.

Therefore, If Im in the sun, and then go into a dark space and turn on a 5000k light, it will look closer to "white", without blue color.

Otoh, If I have been indoors at night under incandescent, and I go into a dark space and turn on a 5000k light, it will look blue. It will also show the green tint more, than it did when sunlight adapted.

Yes it is zebralight I'm looking at. The current one I have now is an XM-L2 5000K

The one I'm looking to buy is XHP50.2 5000K

Will there be any major difference?


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This is what happens we use color temperature and tint interchangeably, which they are not.

Tint describes the magenta green shift below and above the black body radiator. The black body radiator, at least in our line is the line where all the different color temperatures lie.

Best described as a picture perhaps.


In this case there are quantitative methods to describe the quality of light, so called tint bins. Proper names for these methods are the ANSI binning and MacAdams ellipses. Both are different methods to achieve the same thing. Next question is why use these? Well, no LED is perfect and no LED is exactly 5000k on the dot-BBL. So these bins are where the manufacturer expects the LEDs to fall-a certain range.

Very interesting. Thank you for that.


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Leaving out color temperature or tint is there gonna be any other major differences between these 2 emitters ? Other than output of course


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Don't buy an XML2. It's an old led. XHP50.2 is much newer and much more efficient.

I have the XM-L2 now. Was thinking about upgrading to the XHP50.2. But according to zebralights specs, there's really no difference in efficiency on medium output levels, which is what I use the most. The major difference is on high.


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It is likely the difference will be mainly in the beam aspect IE flood and potentially the CRI (better color rendering)