Ted's Blog

In just the last few months, new LED’s were introduced for flashlights by the company Cree. Cree assigns bin numbers to LED’s that indicate how bright they are. All of my newest lights have various Cree LED’s and bin numbers. The Fenix is XR-E LED with a Q5 bin. The tiny flashlight is a XP-E LED (smaller than the XR-E) with a Q5 bin. There isn’t a Q6. For whatever reason, the next level of brightness is R2. The stainless flashlight I just got has an XP-E R2 LED, but I couldn’t tell that it was brighter than the Q5’s. Now there is a new LED called the XP-G which has bin numbers as high as R5. That should be significantly brighter. So I went looking around for cheap R5 flashlights, but couldn’t find any. For whatever dumb reason, I wound up buying an R2 LED that promised to be 250 lumens (my brightest is 180 lumens), not thinking that that probably wasn’t even possible with a R2. Worse, I bought a 6-mode flashlight with 3 different flashy modes (fast strobe, slow strobe, and SOS) and I didn’t realize that the light wouldn’t accept lithium-ion batteries which are the only way to get significant brightness out of a 1xAA light. So it showed up yesterday and it was a kind of decent light. I posted a review with all the details. Anyway, I didn’t like the light and the only way I was going to like it was if I could make it brighter by using a lithium-ion battery, so even though you aren’t supposed to use one, I put one in there anyway. And the light wouldn’t work anymore. I had burned it up. I didn’t even have it a whole day.

But as it turned out, the “driver” which is all the electronics in between the battery and the LED that give it the modes and provide a uniform voltage had burned out. The LED itself was still working. And the switch was still working. These LED’s need 3.6 volts to light up. So a 1xAA flashlight has to boost the voltage up to that level. But a lithium-ion battery is already 3.6 volts. Most lights that use a lithium-ion battery still regulate the voltage so that the brightness doesn’t fade as the battery voltage fades, but you can also “direct drive” a LED. So I found the wires leading from the LED and soldered them onto some plates that were connected to the positive and negative ends of the battery. It didn’t work, but I think that was because of my lousy soldering. I fiddled with the soldering and I would get just a flash of light every now and then. So I fiddled with it some more and now it works! So I have a 1-mode direct drive light. It won’t work at all with an AA battery, but it is quite bright with the lithium-ion battery (maybe my brightest light). So that’s better than nothing.

Why I bought this light

I bought this light on impulse. With the Cree XP-G R5 lights out, I was looking for something that would be brighter than my Fenix L1D. The L1D is good, but if you use a lithium-ion battery it loses the lower modes. I found some R5 lights, but they all used 18650 batteries. So I searched for R2 and came up with the S10, which advertised 250 lumens. I know to be skeptical of DX and KD claims, but that is what got me interested, even though it is an XR-E, not an XP-G LED. Really, the R2 is only one bin above the Q5 I have in my Fenix and the same as the Trustfire XP-E F23 that I had on the way already. DX has some S10 lights available which they say have mode memory and can take a 14500 lithium-ion battery. I checked Kai’s Domain and they had S10’s as well for a couple of dollars less. None of the lights had reviews from owners, which should have kept me away. And I just assumed that KD was carrying the same light as DX, but it turns out that KD does not claim memory mode and says the light is AA only with a maximum voltage of 1.5. If I could get 250 lumens out of an AA, that would be fine, but nobody else is making anything like that, so I should have know the claim was bogus. Anyway, I ordered it. I don’t even like having 3 flashy modes. So it was pretty much a mistake from the beginning and I was too quick to buy.

http://www.kaidomain.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductId=10303

Continue reading “Uniquefire S10 6-mode Review”

Here’s my review of the Trustfire XP-E F23 R2 with beam shots comparing it to my Fenix LD1 Q5 and iTP A3 EOS upgraded. I got the Trustfire from DealExtreme and it took a really long time for it to show up. I filed a PayPal dispute after 4 weeks from the ship date, but it showed up a few days later and I closed the dispute.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.24291

Continue reading “Trustfire XP-E F23 Review”

I probably need a jumping off point concerning some of the flashlights I’ve been getting. If I mention a light in another post, you can come here and see which one I am talking about.

Continue reading “Flashlight Collection”