I took D4 for a short walk (buying flashlights is good for health!), have some things to report.
Like said already many times, knurling is missing.
I noticed a quirk in the UI. If I ramp the light up to a fairly high level, wait for thermal management to restrain it an start ramping again, I expect the light to smoothly change output. It jumps to the previously set level and starts ramping from that.
A weird software bug:
Sometimes the light doesn’t notice that I cut off the power. It doesn’t blink on power-on and doesn’t reset mode to 350 mA. Happened twice accidentally, I couldn’t reproduce. Then after playing some I tried to do it again and it happened: there were no blinks. But then I noticed more: now I can reproduce it at will, it happens every time. I think this may be because I have not turned the light on since it happened, there’s some flash state that makes the light not notice and turning it on resets that.
I like the tint.
Very floody, but still less than I was afraid of.
Everybody knows it, but the output is good.
I thought about that. There could be a minor LED temperature improvement by replacing solid trays with vapor chambers. Or actually large portions of head. It could also make powerful lights (D4 counts) slightly shorter. Likely too expensive to be worthwhile.
You could use heat pipes to spread heat over large heatsinks. It could make them more effective, making monster lights a bit brighter.
You could also use something like paraffin wax to increase thermal capacity and thus increase turbo duration.
Ha ha good point! Well i spent $42 with the tracking , think I may be the only one with no 18350/18500 tube though………….for me the 18650 is compact enough and it eats through one of those fast enough
Generally yes, but protected cells often don’t work in a light like the D4. There are two reasons:
1) It just doesn’t physically fit. Either it’s too thick, and/or it’s too long due to the protection circuit. The D4 probably won’t contact when tightening the tailcap.
2) 99% of protected cells are going to trip most likely due to the current that’s too high. Only recently you have 15A protected cells; those might work… if they fit… But they probably don’t fit anyway.