I just received three of these from FastTech (bought and paid for, not review freebies) and I’m really impressed.
These have ten emitters behind a diffuser, with a very pleasing tint. Side by side, I literally cannot tell the difference between these and a 219B. They appear to be glued together and I don’t really want to wreck one yet, so for now, no tear down.
The lowest setting is definitely a sub-lumen ‘moonlite’, scaling up through five levels to a room filling high that feels like a lot of lumens. They claim it consumes 2.5 watts; I’m not inclined to do the math right now but it’s enough light that you can function quite normally in a good sized room.
The next level above moonlite is a nice, comfortable reading light of perhaps six or eight lumens. I haven’t done any run times (partly because I just got them, and I don’t know the true capacity of my power banks), so I don’t know how efficient they are. They are made of flexible plastic, so their thermal qualities aren’t going to be great - a few minutes on high didn’t give any palpable heat and I think I should have been able to feel some by then.
All in all, I think it’s a great light for five bucks apiece.
Yeah it’s a very nice USB light, a very curious thing about it though:
The current draw on the 3 lowest modes is the same at ~200mA, the reason for this is to avoid self shut down due to low current when used with powerbanks. I guess it uses a small FET inside to burn the power, it kinda defies the purpose of power saving on the low modes but it is a necessary feature to work with most powerbanks.
I bought a few of these but i think they must have been fakes(cheap price) as they only lasted a couple of day`s as bending of the light causes connection problems.
I have had the touch sensitive and the non touch sensitive, Neither have lasted.
Haven’t tried mine extensively but it seems to be well built. However I ran the lowest mode for a couple hours and the area near the button was very warm because of the power being burnt, not sure how would this affect on the long run.
I bought a few of the original non-touch version from BG for ~$1.00 and they have been reliable. One of them has two tight 90° bends and well over 100 hours of use.