You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Overall Rating: ****
Summary:
| Battery: | 18650/2xCR123A |
| Switch: | Reverse clicky |
| Modes: | 1 |
| LED Type: | Cree XP-G R5 |
| Lens: | Glass |
| Tailstands: | No |
| Price Payed: | $17.24 |
| From: | DealExtreme |
Pros:
Cons:
No, not just because I have too many flashlights now, or because I have done driver swaps, or gotten lithium-ion batteries. It is official now because at CandlePower Forums if you post over 100 messages your status goes from “Enlightened” (people with less than 20 posts are “Unenlightened”) to “Flashaholic”. The next step as far as I can tell is 500 posts when you just get an asterisk after Flashaholic.
This started last May when I was at Fry’s and bought a LED bulb for my Versapak Snakelight, so not even a year ago. But I know so much more about flashlights now.
One of the key components of a flashlight is the driver, which is the electronics between the battery and the LED. The primary function of the driver is to regulate the voltage going to the LED. So if you have a 1.5V battery, the driver will increase the voltage to the 3.6V or so that a LED needs. If there are 2 3V batteries, a driver is needed that will reduce the voltage from 6V so that they won’t blow out the LED. But drivers can also give different light levels or provide strobe and SOS modes.
Not long ago I bought a flashlight that uses P60 drop-ins. The advantage to that kind of light is it uses a bunch of standardized parts that can be swapped out. So of course I was on the lookout for some kind of modification (or “mod”) I could do to the light. It is a good light, but comes with 5 modes by default (High, Medium, Low, Strobe, SOS) and always comes on in High. Really I would rather have a 2-mode or 3-mode light that would remember what mode it was in last. If you want Low, it stays in Low until you change it. Well, obviously all I would need to do is find a new driver.
This light has already been reviewed once by sb56637, so this is just my take though the conclusions are mostly the same. This light is very popular among flashlight enthusiasts due to having 3 programmable modes and remembering the last mode you were in. Most budget lights always include one or more strobe modes, including this one where the default settings are High, Low, and Strobe. So it is very nice to be able to get rid of the strobe mode. Also 3 modes provides a very good mix. One mode will always be maximum, and it is nice to get a good low of less than 10 lumens for looking at things up close. The middle mode can either be closer to max to give good output but longer battery life, or closer to to low, especially if the low is set very, very low. The ability to program levels puts this light in league with other programmable lights like the JETBeam, Liteflux, and the Nitecore D10.
Some lights are good for general purposes, some are really bright, some have a really good user interface, and lights like this one are more of a gimmick. They do one trick, in this case, it is able to go from a fairly faint flood of even light to a tiny beam of light that can be thrown at least a hundred yards by using an aspherical lens that can be moved with respect to the LED. At the tightest spot, you are actually seeing a representation of the LED itself, including the 3 strips of a XR-E LED (picture below is of the beam projected onto the ceiling; in real life you can see more detail including some of the bonding wires).
