This sounds very Exciting looking forward to a hands on review Martin. 
I want this but new funds are months away, giveaway?
Martin, make sure to do a beamshot or 2 at spot setting, during your appointment, white wall and outside.
Glückspilz!
This is laser phosphor excitation like some BMW headlights, not a coherent light source. It should be safe.
Martin, check them both out.
Beam shots, we need beam shots.
Yeah they are showing them off at IWA 2018 in Germany, I already asked them, unfortunately I won’t be in europe 
March 9-12
No info yet on buying them though.
Yeah, the laser doesn’t shine directly out of the light, it shines onto a phosphor and then turns into normal white light.
Doing this with 500 lumens though this is literally going to be laser like. I can’t see this beam being particularly useable for much.
The Maxabeam on mid-mode is 450 lumens at 1 degree beam divergence. This W20 is 500 lumens at .8 degree beam divergence so its gonna be brighter and throw farther than a Maxabeam on mid mode.
No, I don’t think it will beat the Maxabeam.
The Maxabeam has a large corona. It’s actually quite difficult to accurately determine the divergence. There is a somewhat smooth transition between spot and corona.
I believe it does around 2-3Mcd in the mid mode?
I did find values stated by an employee from Peakbeam over on CPF regarding the Maxabeam:
It produces a 2” (5,08cm) spot in a distance of 30m.
The divergence only dictates the spot size, not how much lux it has.
I’m not sure how much candela the maxabeam has on normal mode, but I would estimate about half or a third of the max 12Mcd since 450 is about half of the max 1000lm, and the W20 only has 1Mcd.
Cool… I have always wondered why they dont/cant make a white colored laser. Seems like there are other colors… but not white.
As with LEDs, lasers are monochromatic. The effect is even stronger with lasers; where LEDs will have a dominant wavelength on a bell curve, lasers just produce the one wavelength. The spacing and alignment of the waves is consistent in space and time. Lasers are all about sameness.
White LEDs put some phosphor on top of a blue LED and use the blue light to stimulate the emission of other colors. On occasion, it’s a purple or UV LED. The WL20 uses a laser to excite a phosphor instead. The laser can probably excite a smaller area of phosphor at higher intensity, resulting in the crazy high ratio of candela to lumens.
What’s coming out of this thing is not white laser light. It’s phosphor light, similar to a white LED or fluorescent tube.
I’ll be at IWA and swing by Acebeam’s booth. Although I fear it will not be for sale just then.
If you give them enough money it probably will 
But hey, please take some pictures of the lights!
Im not willing to throw more money than needed on lights. Exhibitions like Iwa can be pretty hard on your purse if you are to weak to resist
Interesting light. And unlike their smaller W10, the WL20 is a zoomie. It should be more practical at short range, while the fixed-focus W10 is basically just a long range spotlight or a short-range pointer.
This one’s too expensive for me though, but I like the idea of white laser flashlights.
You guys are probably right and after much research I found a site claiming the Maxabeam Gen 2 was 3 million lux on low, 4.5million on mid, and 6 million on high. But what I don’t understand is how you can have a dimmer light ( maxabeam is about 450 on mid mode) with a less focused beam (1 degree beam divergence) and it have three times the lux of a brighter light ( WL20 is 500 lumens) and a more focused beam(WL20 is 0.8 degree divergence). Unless I’m looking at things wrong the only thing I can come up with is the 500 lumen rating for the WL20 is the lumens at phosphor and not the emitted lumens, and the optical system is very inefficient, and the 450 lumens for the Maxabeam is the emitted lumens and the bulb lumens is higher.
The distribution of lumens is not always even, you can have all the lumens evenly spread out, like this:
Or have them distributed differently, with more concentrated in the middle and less in the outer parts:
If both of the flashlights in the images above had the same divergence and lumens, the second one will have higher lux because it has more of the lumens concentrated in the center.
The maxabeam has a standard reflector which means the distance from the light source to the reflector surface varies from very short to very long, producing a spot that looks like the second image, with a high intensity in the center and then lower as it goes out.
The WL20 has an aspheric lens which produces a distribution more like the first image, since the distance from the light source to all points on the lens is pretty similar, producing an even distribution of light in the spot.
Those values sound accurate. Why don’t you try calulating divergenace using the spot size I mentioned above.
Ahh those pictures demonstrate your point perfectly. I forgot about one being aspheric and the other utilizing a reflector, although the same affect can still happen apart from 2 different focusing mechanisms (or whatever the technical term is).
I don’t really see why its necessary considering Peak Beam gives the official beam divergence on their website :shrugs: