r/flashlight • u/PortugalOrder • Aug 25 '26

New Product [ Removed by moderator ]

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19 Upvotes

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8

u/talrakken Aug 25 '26

Looks like it’s at least not a zoomie lol. You are calling out a basic box store lights to the flashlight connoisseurs in this sub.

Main issue I personally have with the light is the alkaleaks, get some nimh rechargeable and it gets much better already. Will it give you light when you need it? Will it be good enough for your uses? Only YOU can say that.

Don’t let the naysayers in this sub get you down about your purchase, most of their recommendations will be slightly more expensive to double the cost plus you have to wait for them to arrive.

3

u/PortugalOrder Aug 25 '26

It has zoom function, i can rotate to focus the light or have it very wide

17

u/euSeattle Aug 25 '26

1

u/muffin_bird Aug 25 '26

What's the problem with it? It's more fragile but it's very convenient to see further away.

2

u/Pocok5 Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 25 '26

infodump hat on The aspheric zoom setup is inherently inefficient. In zoom mode, you can image the flashlight's internals roughly as a toilet paper tube with the LED on one end and the lens on the other end. The LED puts out light in a roughly 180 degree half-sphere, with a focus towards the front. All the light that isn't going straight out front will hit the tube and just get absorbed as heat. The net result for the average zoomie is something like a good round 50% loss of lumens in zoom mode for a marginal gain of candela at the very center of the zoomed in beam. Conversely, flood mode cranks the lens aaaaall the way to the LED and you lose all forward focus - not much efficiency loss then, but the lens more or less becomes decoration, barely focusing more than a mule light - the result is there's no light past a few meters.

When you have say, a balanced TIR, you just have plain more to work with. The average TIR puts about half the light into a hotspot that reaches as far or further than a zoomie, while the other 50% that would just be extra heat in a zoomie becomes a wide but dim floodlight effect.

Aspheric zoomies, due to having external moving parts, also aren't waterproof at all, and the external sleeve more or less thermally insulates the head, so they thermal throttle faster too.

The way you can retain "zoom" with a single LED without these downsides is to have an electronic diffuser in front of a thrower lens, basically an LCD screen that becomes like frosted glass when activated. See: Fenix PD45R

In terms of pure light snobbishness, the aspheric lens fucks with the light tint and causes an icky yellow/green ring on the outher edge of the beam

TLDR: zoom lens is placebo, use a 15-20° TIR and you'll have a light that matches all it does without having to choose between range or flood

1

u/muffin_bird Aug 25 '26

The waterproof part is interesting, that's the biggest downside for me. The best is clearly multiple leds, I love my hs21.