Originally Posted by
Burton
Just speaking for myself - because riding around with something like this as a supplement to every emitter doesn't exactly look like a worthwhile tradeoff to me:
Total 'out the front' lumens are dependent on several other things besides the extent the emmitter is driven to. An efficient optical system and an effective beam pattern can make a difference of a lot more than 30%.
Since most people in this forum seem intent on 'trading up' every few years anyway - its probably incidental. Personally I don't have any such intentions and already drive with as much or more lumens than anyone else on the board. My emitters are only driven to 80%. I probably just deal with less heat issues.
You're right about that set up in the first link having a lot of thermal mass. That was the setup for the XM-L on star, and it still suffered from a lot of thermal sag. Did you click on the second link? I see much less thermal mass. This could actually go in a flashlight or bike light.
It's this setup that produced the spectacular results, including a 12% improvement in output at 3 amps, and seemingly no thermal limitations.
All datapoints are lumen snapshots 30sec after power on. Once the test was complete, out of curiosity I set the power supply to 5 amps and let it run. After 5 minutes, lumens dropped from 1367 to 1357 for a 10 lumen drop... in a word - Wow!
Now maybe you see why I like the idea of making my own copper pill. As far as upgrading, that's just an emitter swap away. Optics don't change much, although getting a
lens with good anti reflective coating would be an excellent idea. Batteries are an ongoing upgrade because they lose capacity over time and better batteries should continually become available.
I would love for budget lights to have copper pills, but since copper is expensive, I don't see that happening. Are there any US manufactured lights with copper pills? I'd assume they would already have anti reflective coated lenses and high quality batteries.
I don't know if you noticed, but I didn't mention anything about OTF performance, just getting the emitter itself to perform to spec. Thank you for expanding the subject though. The emitter is just one small part of a lighting system.