Really, you can replace the LEDs with better LED's easily? I did not know you could do that. Can you get more LUMs out of your light that way? Is that a cheaper alternative to getting brighter video lights... instead of buying more expensive lights with more LUMS, buy a cheaper light like the intova super nova and then change out the LEDs to get more LUMs? If so, could you please direct me to where I can get better LED's that will fit an intova super nova. Thank you.
Haven't seen what the inside looks like but P4's are probably mounted on a small board similar to one here:
Cutter Electronics
Since all of the XR-E's are the same dimensions with same voltage and current requirements (thus same power consumption) I could see how it could be an easy swap to change for a higher bin LED setup.
As long as the LEDs are mounted on a PCB with the same spacing config as in is the original you should be able to just unsolder some wires and solder in the new PCB and reassemble using same driver, same batts, same optics, same burn-time ... with brighter LEDs.
Some of the different colors for the XR-E's do have different max currents though, the P4 used is probably cool white. As example cool white has max recommended drive current of 1A, whereas the neutral white and warm white is 700mA.
As an idea, each P4 has a min flux @ 1A and 25 deg C of approx 180 lum and could be up to 196 lum. The Q5 has a min flux @ 1A and 25 deg C of approx 241 lum and could be up to 256 lum each per CREE's spec sheets. R2 is something like 256-274 lum.
So with three R2's it could produce something like 750 lum.
I'm sure color is important too, especially for video and to be honest I don't understand all of the color stuff for their LEDs, but each bin is available in different tints.
LEDs also avail at sites like kaidomain.com and dealextreme.com or bestofferbuy.com pretty cheap. Shipping and customer service may not be the best though, chinese companies...
Of course I've never seen the inside of this light or how it's setup but it really could be that simple.
I don't know why they don't use higher bin LEDs, I contacted Intova regarding one of their smaller lights and they said it used an XR-E Q3 which should be able to be easily swapped out for say an XR-E R2 and provide somewhere around 100lum more light.
I did that out of curiousity as I was reading up on CREE LEDs and found out Intova used CREE LEDs in their lights from a friend of mine that has one.
I still have that e-mail somewhere, I think at home.
I find myself really shying away from the higher-end lights, while they seem to have better construction than some other lights it seems pretty easy to modify some inexpensive lights to accept CREE LEDs and outperform lights that are significantly more expensive.
That does look like a sweet light though
