FW3A, a TLF/BLF EDC flashlight - SST-20 available, coupon codes public

Hard to beat info direct from the horse’s mouth. :smiley:

Mountain Electronics still has the original difference. When I wrote the initial post I hadn’t checked IntOutdoors.

$x extra for more expensive LEDS does not directly translate into $x extra on retail price. Far from it. Perhaps twice. That’s even assuming the materials are available, and consistent and have been evaluated and found especially good by The Team in prototype 3. At least three reels of them, that’s a significant investment, LED cost is a substantial proportion of the materials cost (not selling price). Plus the NRE for the mechanical design, and CNC programming/tooling, operator/assembler training with good QC, and the tooling and procurement and production-engineering of the driver and MCPCB.

Get real, if Lumintop are going to make say 1000, for BLF/TLF combined, at say $30 each , packaged well (this costs real money, whereas a poly bag and some bubblewrap doesn’t, and is just as good once the torch is in your hand), delivered around the world, including any duties, that’s a maximum of $30,000 turnover. If they recoup even $3 per copy they can maybe make $10,000 from this.

Hardly enough to pay just one good Western engineer for for a month or maybe two.

Push up the materials budget by just $1 and the economics start to fall apart. This was also the case with the Q8, where I think we got an absolute bargain with substantially more delivered than was originally specified, the price held, and it turned out even better than I expected.

Armchair pundits are welcome to their (sometimes repetitive) views, but in the real world things have to be affordable for the purchaser, and at least break-even for the manufacturer, at the BLF discount price.

I am price sensitive too, and don’t wish to see it increase beyond the original offer, despite the intervening years, inflation, tariff changes and other uncertainties.

It’s a great idea, but by no means an essential thing for me to own.

Lumintop are doing us a good favour by participating in this, and the GT, I thank them for it, hope we all learn how to participate equally, and imagine The Miller looking on with a wry smile.

Good……. :+1:

I don’t care, just gimme a host :smiley:

… and make sure the FW3A’s head is NOT glued. That way we can swap in our own choice of emitter later.

And while you’re at it, don’t glue the tailcap either. Some of us like to perform a “clipectomy” on our new lights. That might be difficult to do if the clip cannot be removed due to the tailcap being glued.

I tried to carefully describe the tint of the LH351D 4000K 90CRI, which as you can read in the link above I described as very nice, but in the description the word ‘green’ is present, as part of a complete comparative tint description that is very favourable for the led. But the word ‘green’ is bad so that is of course all that is remembered. Just like ‘rosy’ is the good word and will give good vibes however unnatural the tint is :smiley:

djozz, do you think the current-based tint shift shouldn’t be mentioned? Is it equal to or less than the effect seen on other emitters?

  1. is where the beauty’s at!

Nude Gnus
the Silent Majority does not want 5000k

jon_slider, don’t you think that’s being a bit manipulative? I mean, of course the 5000k doesn’t get 50% or more of the votes, but it DOES have the highest percentage for a single CCT choice in that poll. And the second choice, as you can see, is 4500k, which isn’t really that much different. So, MOST people would, in fact, be happy with a ~5000k light.

+1 DavidEF :+1:

Or perhaps most people would be most happy with a 4500k light, since it’s the least different from the three as a whole? :stuck_out_tongue:

Jon sows chaos wherever possible!
But seriously, it’s obvious that the BLFers who voted 4500 were wanting to vote 5000k but tried to appease the warm tint crowd. They would take a small loss for the greater good. That’s how we 5000k folks roll.

The HI option is sounding good for a versatile pocket light.
Love listening to you smart folks talk about all the differences in beams and optics. Who would’ve thought all the crazy differences in optics paired with different emitters? Sounds like you’ve almost got it worked out for a perfect combination.

I’ve made this awful vow to not buy another light until Black Friday, unless it’s this one (technically 2). I need this special elegant triple!

I decided to show that a floody light can be perfectly usable outdoors. The treeline is 200ft away according to satellite images.


This is roughly what it looked like in real life with eyes that had just been looking at a white computer screen for an hour; so they were not at all dark adjusted. However the eyes have better dynamic range; the nearby stuff doesn’t glare like that and the darker stuff isn’t as dark. This is using a d4 219c which due to the cells in it, their state of charge, the lee minus green filter, etc should throw pretty close to the same as the fw3a would with the samsung leds. However the fw3a would actually have significantly more lumens than this d4, oddly enough. That’s impressive, from a light with 1 less emitter.

So what can I conclude from this? Well, if this is how it looks without dark adaptation, then with it, I would not need anything like turbo. Furthermore, even this amount of flood is still not even covering the width of the frame; so it’s maybe 55 degrees of light or less before it fades off. As you can see, this is a much nicer angle of view that doesn’t make for tunnel vision when you’re looking around with it. It covers a good area with light, so if you were looking for something, I daresay you’d find it rather quickly. If I wanted to look around for longer, of course I’d switch to something with more mass and heatsinking like a q8, or move up to a c8 or d1s if I really needed to keep whatever was happening 200ft away lit brightly for the longest time possible. But for EDC use, checking out the area around me and then dropping back down to say half of that brightness, which gives you 141ft if this is 200, or even 1/4 of max brightness, which still gives you 100ft, seems like a perfectly reasonable thing. Heck, just for keeping an eye on what’s within a ~70ft radius would only take 400 lumens or so; the fw3a can surely dissipate that amount of heat with a lh351d easily. It’ll even smoothly ramp down the brightness so you will barely notice the change.That’s all assuming the same exposure as here, which is based on a NON-adapted eye!

Somewhat, but to say that most would be happy with 5000K isn’t necessarily correct either. I love 4500K and 4000K, but wouldn’t be happy with 5000K. 5000K is decent during the day, but I personally rarely use flashlights during the day. For me 4500K is perfect for daytime and decent at night. 4000K is great at night, and decent during the day. Under 4000K is great at night, but terrible during the day.

If it helps at all, I took beam shots of two lights and put them into an animated GIF:

  • 2.1 cd/lm: XP-G2 ~4600K w/ 10623 optic, at 108 lm. (tint is a mix: 5D+3D+3D+2B)
  • 4.0 cd/lm: XP-L HI 5000K w/ 10511 optic, at 107 lm.

The floody one is the closest thing I have to how the LH351D is expected to look.

I didn’t attempt to correct for the difference in color temperature. They used the same exposure and settings, and I shot the floodier one first, so it auto-white-balanced for that one and made the 5000K emitter look a bit colder than it should. Both were aimed at the center of the green part of the tree.

So, this is basically the entire extent of throwy-vs-floody available to the FW3A. They’re all pretty floody, but not to the same degree.

Hmm, simulated samsung == SimSung ? I like it, btw.

Nice pics. :+1:
The xp-l has that typical looking TIR beam that I’m used to and don’t like which is a defined hotspot and very weak spill. I dont like that for walking around at night. I have to swing the light around to see left, right and near my feet. I gave up on that style.

The simulated is harder for me to see the hotspot, but it does look like the spill light is much brighter. Something I could hold steady in front of me and see everything as I walk along. Plus it would be better at close range as well. So I prefer this optic shape/style.

With a 10507 optic, it’s pretty much just a hotspot with some corona artifacts around it. With domed Cree emitters, the edge of the hotspot has a different tint than the rest of the beam. It looks pretty good with Nichia 219b though, and would probably look decent with LH351D. It just has twelve petals around the hotspot, like hour markers on a clock — if the clock had major lines at 4, 8, and 12 instead of 3, 6, 9, and 12.

That’s the same hotspot-only beam type as the Noctigon Meteor, except the Meteor has 24 petals instead of 12 so they’re harder to see. I’m not a big fan of this beam type, but that’s just a personal preference.

The frosted 10511 optic has actual spill around the hotspot, and blends colors pretty well, but the spill has no defined edge. It can easily be polished to increase throw, or left as-is for more flood. The twelve petals can be seen when looking very carefully, but they’re mostly not noticeable.

The floody 10623 quad optic I used makes it even harder to tell where the hotspot ends and the spill begins. It mostly just gets gradually dimmer as it gets farther away from the center. No artifacts of any type are visible. For a triple, the equivalent would be a 10508 or 10509 optic. Any FW3A can be made extra-floody like this by changing the optic.

Quick reference:

  • 10507: Clear narrow-spot triple.
  • 10511: Frosted narrow-spot triple.
  • 10508, 10509: Frosted triples with medium and wide spots.
  • 10623: Frosted medium-spot quad.

So if you used this frosted optic it will be quite floody. Then if you wanted more throw you could just polish it? That kind of seems like the best of both worlds as long as the people who want more throw were actually willing to do a little polishing.