Cree has set us up with a confusing situation. The 630nm reds are binned for brightness with the P3 bin, but the 660nm Photo Reds use P2 P3 P4 and P5 to designate the wavelength rather than the brightness bin. For brightness they use groups 13 and 14, order numbers ending in 801 and 901. Luckily for us, the only photo reds I have seen have all been the higher bin group 14 (901). As EF pointed out LED-tech claims to have group 15 but according to the Cree XPE
binning and labeling PDF on page 32, group 13 and 14 are for the photo reds and group 15 is for the royal blues so I dunno we might want to investigate that? Also they are asking almost $7 ea while cutter is asking $2.60. That allows us to run them softer which makes them more efficient and cheaper in practice.
Here is how the deep reds stack up, if we normalize to 700mA Tj 50C we get:
Cree XPE 630nm P3 bin - 40.8% - $4.09/PAR W
Cree XPE2 630nm P3 bin - 38.5% - $5.63/PAR
Cree XPE Photo Red group 14 - 42.4% - $4.60/PAR W
Luxeon ES 660nm EX6 bin - 38.25% - $5.66/PAR W
Osram Hyper red 656nm 3T bin - 39.9% - $6.81/PAR W
Long story short, the XPE red is cheapest from AC-RC.net you can choose 20mm stars and the photo red is cheapest from Cutter on 10mm stars. Personally I dislike 10mm stars so I would go through the trouble of remounting them onto 20mm stars LOL. There is one other problem, Cutter charges quite a lot for basic shipping. I am currently talking to Mark to see if there are any other options.