Rejoice DIY LED builders! Cree, in their mighty engineering prowess has seen fit to give their popular XT-E royal blue LED a spec bump recetly, letting you squeeze even more from an already powerful LED. This update puts the XT-E royal blue on par with the newer XT-E white with a maximum current of 1500mA or about 5 watts, up from 1000mA on initial release. With the current at maximum, that gives you up to a mind numbing 1705mW of 455nm light.
This isn’t the first time that Cree has done this, as they did the same thing to the XP-E royal blue, bumping the maximum current from 700mA to 1000mA a few months after release. What is odd is that Cree hasn’t put out an official press release for the update, which is something they normally do. Turns out Cree has been sitting on this one for a month based on the last datasheet revision date, but a little birdie in the know tipped us off, and we verified it in the datasheet. Hooray for free performance gains!
