[REVIEW] Acebeam W10. 1KM of throw, in your front pocket. 21700/18650, USB-C charging.

Thanks for the review, but could you include the pictures in the review itself instead of links to imgur, makes it soooo much more readable, and it saves your readers time and having to look at adverts and distractive pics irrelevant to your story.

Wow having no buck/boost driver for the laser diode on such an expensive light sucks, not a good solution as its peak lumens are already not that much

Djozz:

The issue is how many pictures there are. I wouldn’t want to include all the pictures and make the review annoying to read, either. Some of the pictures, specially the beamshots, are better when seen at full resolution too.

Perhaps adding the pictures at small scales would work better if I wanted to insert all the pictures directly.

Lexel: Agreed. It really should have a flat output at the price point. I don’t know what the amp draw and forward voltage is on the led, but perhaps the light could benefit from a driver swap.

No regulation. No LVP. No UI. Does it even have a driver?

Looks like a prototype really….

I agree that embedding is better as an inline picture disturbs the flow of reading so much less than having to go to external site…

I always resize my pictures to be seen sharp on an average monitor, but not bigger: 1000 pixels wide when filling out the page (100), 800 pixels for 80 screen etc. This does not create large files and thus loading the page is fast. Only rarely a full size pic is relevant in my posts.

Btw, I’d love to see a teardown of the W10 head, who’s sacrifying one for the team? :party:

That “Klingon Attack Bezel” is the ugliest thing I have seen in a while.

I like AceBeam lights but they are never really cheap (huge margin). But i think the LEP emitter was to expensive so they had to cutback somewhere else to keep up the margin.
End result: It feels like a 270$ prototype.
I would like to know how much this emitter cost and how long we have to wait to be able to buy one.

Laser is definitely interesting. I wish there’s a version with much more than 200 lumens though.

It’s hard to do without having the laser burn through the phosphor.

Multi-emitter may be the answer.

Can’t do multi-emitter in an aspheric light without increasing head size, which would destroy the point of the W10, IMO.

I think we will simply have to wait for improvements to LEP emitters.

I personally don’t think the W10 needs more lumens. The emitter is already very inefficient. I’d rather get longer runtimes or even better throw. The W10 needs a companion flashlight to really be used in the field.

Who said it should be aspheric? :wink:

If you wanted to use multiple LEP emitters and reflectors to increase lumens, you would be better of with a typical led+reflector setup, really.

Why?
LEP has double luminance of LED (as long as the LED doesn’t have a collar - and that’s the case with reflector lights).
This means double beam intensity.
…That’s assuming you can run them all to the max. Which should be doable as long as the host is properly sized.

LEP produce very few lumens. You really need to make use of every single one of those lumens and focus it without any spill to take advantage of the main feature of LEP: A very small die size.

A reflector won’t be able to do this as well as a properly focused lens.

If you want a similar throw, with more lumens (larger beam size at target distance), and are willing to increase bezel size to get there, an XHP-35 HI light with a reflector can easily get you there.

If you want double the throw, and are OK with the small beam size, you want a single LEP in a larger lens. http://www.acebeam.com/wl20-throw-2000m

It’s not hard to do what the W10 does with common leds if you don’t mind increasing bezel size. The entire point of the W10 is that the bezel is, for it’s throw, incredibly small.

Using 4 LEP is not the answer to increase throw. Using multiple emitters is never the answer for longest throw/bezel mm, because it increases die size. No dedicated thrower uses multiple emitters for this very reason.

1. Reflector vs lens:
Properly focused reflector will capture more light than a properly focused lens. (Well, it’s actually independent from whether they are focused properly or not).
According to Enderman’s calculators deep reflector can capture about 60% of light. The rest is spill.
With a lens even 40% is a huge stretch. With a F# if 1 you’re capturing under 17%. The rest is lost.

2. XHP35 HI vs LEP
XHP35 HI gets 170 cd/mm² at the max. LEP does 400. You need to increase head diameter by 50% for the LED to compete.

3. Single vs. multi-emitter
In theory, using multiple emitters is often the best answer for the longest throw / size. But I define size as overall light volume, which boils down to head volume.
Why? As you noted, if you compare a single-emitter light to a multi-emitter and keep emitters constant, light emitting surface gets bigger which may cause thermal and electrical hardness.
Also, multi-emitter lights also have lower effective reflector area for the given head diameter.

The latter can be somehow countered by using configurations that maximize head usage. Like 7-up. Then you get a fair use of frontal area. Then you scale the diameter up to have the same effective area as with a single-emitter. You end up with smaller head volume yet the same throw.
The former can be countered in theory by using smaller emitters. LEPs are small. The smallest LED that we know to be good is a little over 1 mm². Quite big already, so in practice it’s not so great as in theory….because it adds up to 100 W near-peak with a 7-up. Needs a hefty host.

Also, focusing multi-emitter light might be harder. How precisely can we solder emitter to MCPCB? I have a hunch that the error margin may be comparable to light emission surface diameter….

1.

Given that I currently have a standard BLF GT, and a second one with exactly the same driver and led, but using a 120mm aspheric lens, and getting more throw out of it (1.3 vs 1.5mcd), I think there is more to it than “reflectors are better than lenses”. No wavien collar installed (yet).

Enderman himself has used lenses for a lot of his lights, and has had to stop because getting bigger lenses was getting impossible.

2.

Adding more emitters to increase throw forces you to have a bigger head regardless. If you try to cram more emitters in the same space, you have to get by with smaller reflectors/lenses for each emitter, which will decrease the focus/increase the spill/increase the angle of the beam.

3.

“In theory, using multiple emitters is often the best answer for the longest throw / size.” No it isn’t. It literally isn’t.

Just look at the list of the best throwers Most Powerful Flashlights in the World (by throw distance)

Or even direct examples. The TN42 uses a single led+reflector on a 100mm bezel, 2000 lumens, and claims 1550 meters of throw. The TN40S uses 4 leds, the same 100mm bezel, 4450 lumens, and claims 1150 meters of throw. The XP-L HI emitters used on the TN40S even have higher cd/mm die than the XHP35 HI used on the TN42.

If you increase the throw by adding multiple emitters and running them all hard and increasing reflector size, you are not getting more throw because multiple emitters are better for throw. You are getting more throw because you have a using more power on a bigger light.

There are many factors that affect throw and optics quality is among them. A shallow reflector (like GT) has a smaller working area than a lens. A deep one has larger. Quality also matters, a lot.

With collar. Which is really a game changer.

Yes, you lose some area by having more emitter openings as well as some around the edges. In case of a siamesed 7-up it’s like what - 10% loss? Let’s make it 20% to have a good margin. You make up for it with 10% larger diameter. But your reflector is 6.3 times shorter. This won’t make your head 6 times shorter but 20%? Way more than that.

XHP35 HI at 2200 lumens does ~130 cd/mm². XP-L HI at 1200 lm does ~100 cd/mm².
I don’t really advocate quads as a quad is less efficient (when it comes to head use) than a 7-up.
And as I said, if you define size as diameter - single emitter wins. If you define it as volume - these 2 lights aren’t really comparable.

As long as you reduce die size proportionally to the number of emitters - no, at the given luminance you use the same power. But as I said it works better in theory than it does in practice.

Everything else you said is right, but if you simply add more emitters without changing the area of the optic all you’re doing is creating more lumens, not more throw.
The intensity would not change, the light output increases and you would get a larger spot (or multiple spots in this case, since the LES is so small)

Actually, since I said about making emitters smaller, I don’t gain lumens either. I just reduce head volume at the cost of having flowery beam and higher price. In some cases reducing cooling and worsening ergonomics as well, though in others either may be improved.

If we move out of the theoretical case of using 7-times smaller emitter then yes, multi-emitter thrower uses more power and gives more lumens without improving lux.

The whole discussion started with complaints that W10 does only 200 lm. I chimed in because I share that concern, I like certain cd/lm range and W10 is way out of it. A 7-up reflector would put at the very least 1500 in the beam and likely 2000+. It couldn’t be W10 sized though due to heat….