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Spec me an LED Torch
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Man of Honour
My Manafont XM-L P60 drop-in finally ****** arrived yesterday.
At the tailcap I have measured that it pulls 3.2amps from a 18560 cell, insane. One thing I will say is this drop-in will determine the men from the boys with your 18650 cells, many cheap 18650 cells will be unable to have this kind of load thrown upon them.
More to follow tomorrow.. but don't be expecting any runtime graphs from me on this one in high mode. As I can guarantee the driver will destroy the LED if ran in high for longer than 10 minutes, heat is a slight issue.
I hope mine arrives soon too lol, it left HK on the 5th so I wonder if it will be today...
I have Ultrafire 2400mAh cells btw, hopefully these are man enough to deliver :d
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Very Nice. which one do you prefer?
Also, Edit-button dude!
The Olight has better build quality and throws light further but is over double the cost of the Solarforce. I do prefer the Olight though.
Soldato
My Manafont XM-L P60 drop-in finally ****** arrived yesterday.
At the tailcap I have measured that it pulls 3.2amps from a 18560 cell, insane. One thing I will say is this drop-in will determine the men from the boys with your 18650 cells, many cheap 18650 cells will be unable to have this kind of load thrown upon them.
More to follow tomorrow.. but don't be expecting any runtime graphs from me on this one in high mode. As I can guarantee the driver will destroy the LED if ran in high for longer than 10 minutes, heat is a slight issue
Still waiting for mine to turn up, had the body with no drop-in for ages now
.Is there any better online stores to buy drop-ins from? CBA waiting this long again.
Still waiting for mine to turn up, had the body with no drop-in for ages now
Is there any better online stores to buy drop-ins from? CBA waiting this long again.
For the cheap Chinese ones, not really.
if you want, you can buy more expensive "brand-name" dropins like Thrunite, Malkoff and Dereelight from proper flashlight-eshops, or you could get them made to order from Nailbender on CandlePowerForums - Both would be faster than waiting on DX, Manafont or Kaidomain.
Soldato
For the budget lights/drop-ins afraid we are at the mercy of the Chinese/Hong Kong Post. Manafont have been the slowest I have come across though, it took over 5 weeks for my XM-L P60 drop-in to arrive.
Budget lights are fun don't get me wrong, they provide a massive amount of light output for the money.
But...
Once the excitement of the high mode is over, in reality you won't be using high mode much for general things as it will be too bright for a start, also there are plenty of times where you need your cells to last more than an hour. Budget lights can be crippled by inefficient drivers but more to the point that cheap and nasty way of achieving lower brightness modes.... PWM.
Pulse Width Modulation. I don't mind it at higher frequencies but the problem is many budget lights make use of PWM with such a low frequency which is detectable by the eye. The light quality is just plain nasty to me. I know that it differs from person to person, but I CANNOT STAND IT.
Might as well call anything but high mode the 'raver strober' mode.
Budget lights are fun don't get me wrong, they provide a massive amount of light output for the money.
But...
Once the excitement of the high mode is over, in reality you won't be using high mode much for general things as it will be too bright for a start, also there are plenty of times where you need your cells to last more than an hour. Budget lights can be crippled by inefficient drivers but more to the point that cheap and nasty way of achieving lower brightness modes.... PWM.
Pulse Width Modulation. I don't mind it at higher frequencies but the problem is many budget lights make use of PWM with such a low frequency which is detectable by the eye. The light quality is just plain nasty to me. I know that it differs from person to person, but I CANNOT STAND IT.
Might as well call anything but high mode the 'raver strober' mode.
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It depends on the torch... broadly speaking yes, it's probably possible, within different levels of difficulty. it could be a case of swapping a Dropin (easy) up to swapping both LED and Driver (very involved).
post what light you have (preferably with a picture, particularly of the LED) and we'll see what we can do.
I Suppose i'm lucky that i've never had a cheaplight that had PWM that was slow enough to be especially annoying.
At the moment, my only light that actually has modes is my iTP EOS A2, and the PWM on that is about 500Hz because it's VERY hard to see, i can usually only see it from specular reflections.
Either way, usually i prefer my lights to only have one mode, and i pick the flashlight suited to the mode i'm looking for a the time, correspondingly, my XM-L and XR-E R2 doesn't get used a huge amount, especially compared to my little A2
the problem is, PWM is the only efficient method of light attentuation that doesn't involve literally dumping energy into a resistor of some sort.
When the digital circuits used in Flashlights today were too expensive and complex to use, you'd see flashlights that controlled modes with a big fat resistor, and in those you hardly got better runtime in low than in high.
Take a look at this wee beastie flashlight from days gone by:
http://dansdata.com/littlefriend.htm
Chunky resistor!
PWM means that almost no energy at all (relatively) is being used for the periods of time when the LED is not lit, which is undeniably a good thing for battery life.
Even so, i still prefer mode-less lights, although i definitely do see why people use them, i find the simplicity presented by just carrying more than one light with different brightnesses is the better option, not to mention that you effectively have twice as many batteries with you at a time
Soldato
I remember playing with variable resistors when I was young'en, made some baseball cap into a make shift headlamp not particular bright but was interesting at the time. Was always very frustrated by the fact that the variable resistor is like a black hole for energy.
I don't mind the use of PWM at higher frequencies, as it becomes undetectable to the eye. Just that many budget lights utilise such a low frequency of PWM to generate the other modes.
You will certainly notice it on the Low Mode of the Manafront XM-L drop-in.
I would say the Manafont has the lowest frequency of PWM out of all my lights. The KD XM-L drop-in has a far higher rate of frequency.. still noticeable but not as bad as the Manafont.
I don't mind the use of PWM at higher frequencies, as it becomes undetectable to the eye. Just that many budget lights utilise such a low frequency of PWM to generate the other modes.
You will certainly notice it on the Low Mode of the Manafront XM-L drop-in.
I would say the Manafont has the lowest frequency of PWM out of all my lights. The KD XM-L drop-in has a far higher rate of frequency.. still noticeable but not as bad as the Manafont.
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Fair enough, some of the Chinese torches are so badly designed...
Man of Honour
I don't think you're going to be converting that to proper UV any time soon without changing the bulb unless you mean simulated "Black light" effect?
I have one of those btw!
unless you mean simulated "Black light" effect?I have one of those btw!
Black light effect (visible UV?) would be good, wimilar to to sort of things they used to see scorpions.I don't think you're going to be converting that to proper UV any time soon without changing the bulb
I have one of those btw!
I love the beam it projects when you tighten the focus on it, blinding!
Man of Honour
That's what I thought until I got the C8 and SolarForce XP-G
The Q5 is now on the shelf
Soldato
Or you could have bought one rechargeable 
j/k.
Does anyone know of any reviews on the Fenix TK15? I cant seem to search on CPF. Wondering how much brighter it is than my TK12 and if it throws any better.
j/k. Does anyone know of any reviews on the Fenix TK15? I cant seem to search on CPF. Wondering how much brighter it is than my TK12 and if it throws any better.
Or you could have bought one rechargeable
Does anyone know of any reviews on the Fenix TK15? I cant seem to search on CPF. Wondering how much brighter it is than my TK12 and if it throws any better.
it won't Throw better - the XP-G led has a much larger die (and the XM-L is larger again) and thus is quite hard to collimate into a nice throwy beam.
it'll almost certainly produce lots more light though
the XP-G can do 93 lumens per watt at 1.5A, for a total of 493 lumens - powerfull little blighters!
And regarding the batteries, yes, i could have bought one rechargeable... but i'd be prepared to bet that it wouldn't power a wristwatch, let alone a Flashlight in August 2020
(and that's assuming it hasn't exploded
)
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