The new Cree XM-L2 LED, what has improved?

In 2010 Cree introduced the Xlamp XM-L LED, the brightest single-die LED in the market at the time. Its advertised maximum brightness was 1040 lumen at 10 Watt, a very impressive number.

Now, with the new XM-L2 Cree, narrows the gap between advertised and real world performance by improving the LED itself and also binning it at 85°C instead of the lab standard of 25°C.

 At 25°C the min. luminous flux for 700mA for Cool White increased by 41 lumen to 341 (Bin U2) a 13.6% increase.

At 85°C we cannot compare the two versions but Cree promises a maximum of 1052 lumen Watt which means a 20% performance real world increase.

 The change in binning temperature is actually a quiet and important evolution of the LED industry which we will approach in another post. For now lets look below and see why at higher temperature the performance gap between the old XM-L and the new XM-L 2 gets larger.

At 100 °C the XM-L2 losses only 3-4% of flux compared with 15-16% of the older XM-L.

You can purchase both versions in our shop here.