nice review brted, thanks
I agree with all your points
Can you compare the light output of moonlight vs low mode? I wonder if the meter reading them to be only factor of 2 appart at most is accurate.
My amp meter only reads to the nearest 10mA, plus it isn't RMS, so the PWM could be affecting the values. By eye, the Low is noticeably brighter than Moonlight, but they aren't far off. I'll get some better comparison photos tonight.
I also got mine today and fully agree to your findings. Did you really solder on alu?
Was'nt the LED supposed to be an R2?
I have a remark to the first picture in Light Output (comparison to the L1D).
The BLF looks colder to me than 5000K. I would rather think that L1D is about 5000K
That's what I kind of suspected. A photo with reasonable exposure time would integrate the values in a more predictable way :).
Excellent review brted! Thanks for the exquisite detail and fantastic pics, as we've come to expect from you. Very much appreciated. Frontpage'd and Sticky'd.
So, we learned some things from this first BLF mod. First, we need to space out those first two modes. The problem is that mode #1 didn't go quite as low as I expected (was hoping for 1 lumen), so compared with the specified 6 lumens of mode #2, the difference is almost negligible, and not visible to the naked eye. Maybe for the next mode we can bump up mode #2 to around 12 lumens, and at the same time try to fix that PWM flicker on mode #1. I still wonder if maybe the low PWM frequency might help to give impressive runtime on mode #1, though. I'm currently in the beginning of my own runtime test on mode #1. And as for the DOA issue, that's definitely not acceptable. I would be among those that would give this a 0-star rating if it required removing the pill and soldering it. This is sort of a conflict, because apart from this glaring quality issue, the rest of the quality is actually pretty good, and excellent in some aspects.
I still wonder if maybe the low PWM frequency might help to give impressive runtime on mode #1, though.
Not really. Ideally it's kept as high as the circuit will allow/stablize. Tido in his experiments was doing khz or 10's of khz pwm, but that's with 7135's.
For the next one, it would be best if they could use some variant of Tido's programmable driver. They would be required to show the source given GPL and you can play with it at will.
Well, yes, for optimal light quality for the eyes the frequency should be as high as possible. But for optimal runtime, doesn't low PWM improve runtime, because technically the light is off a lot of the time?
Great review brted!
I'm disappointed that my black BLF light was DOA. I've started the email game but have yet to hear from them. I'll give them a day or 2 before I get PayPal involved but hopefully they will fix the problem before it goes that far.
It's bigger/fatter than all of my 1AA lights except for my Icon Rogue 1. They both look more like an 18650 light than a 1AA light. I also don't like the metal switch which still rattles a bit. I do love our custom modes and the how well it is built. Plus the case and especially the really nice lanyard is a great addition.
Sorry you got a dud. Did you try the live chat support? You just have to catch them online during regular business hours in their time zone.
Thank you for such a detail review. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that mine works out of the box as I have no soldering skills.
I am very impressed with the beam shots and light output from this light. Since the 2 low modes are similar, I think it would be an improvement to drop one of the low modes and make this a 3 mode light.
I haven't yet tried their Live Chat but if they don't respond to my email by tomorrow then I will give it a try.
Has anyone here tried to deal with Manafonts customer service? If so, how did it go? Thanks.
Besides the broken lens, mine also came flickering. The flickering went away when I tightened the flashlight head. It seems that the threads are non-conducting, so the body tube needs to be screwed in enough to touch the pill for it to work.
btw nice review, brted! Thanks.
With PWM there are two main orthogonal parameters involved, frequency and duty cycle. Duty cycle is the ratio of the on time to off time for each cycle. It's largely seperate from the frequency, which is how long each of those cycles are.
So in this case, the cycle time is long-ish (perhaps <200hz since I seem to recall the old A3 is 200hz), and the duty cycle is 40/2000 mA or about 1:50 on/off, or 2%.
The modes are about 100%, 20%, 4%, 2%.
The question brted is working on is to determine whether that 40mA measurement is actually accurate (I suspect it is, but not sure). His meter would've been set to DC amps, which should average out this number (the actual waveform has spikes for the pwm if viewed with an osciloscope), but we want to be sure. A camera shot with exposure time >1/20 exposure or so should do a proper integration.
I added this to the article, but to make it easier, I'm posting the comparison between Moon and Low here too:
Here are two more shots comparing Moonlight mode and Low against the A3. This time the photos are taken at 1/5 second to exaggerate the brightness. Here is Moonlight:
Now on Low. There is a distinct difference, but it's not much:
A shame about the two low modes being so close , still , double the run time in moon mode [ dep on batt ] ...
As for the contact issue ? Driver to pill , or battery tube to pill ... Anyhow , hope mine arrives soon , dont look like it will be till next week now .
Is this a 5000k or not ?
From what our more knowledgeable users say, it sounds like it is. If you measured it with instruments, I imagine there would be variation between samples, but for all practical intents and purposes to the naked human eye, it's a nice neutral color.
The tint looks the same as most budget lights, which is cool white. Others have said theirs is more neutral. It's not cold white, but it has no vanilla or yellow to it either.