Has anyone`s Z1 GB clone (aka informally as the COMETA 2016) burned down their house yet?.................

Makes me wish I ordered a dozen, too.

Being I had been watching these clones at least every 3 days since July of 2016 or so, when I saw they had the price these at or about cost I can assure you that well before I posted these clones here I had a quit long conversation with MeSelf, very long, like a couple days I sat on this find just thinking ….
Like Should I…? or Should I not, should I not post these and spare people agony since I knew there’s still a lot of hard feelings and 2nd thinking was about should I just keep mum and buy them all up myself thinking I should be able to sell these for at least $20-$25 ea, I still think they’re worth that much frankly, but you can only sell them as long as there’s no extreme hard feeling as bad as I believed there might still be,
But then again I thought, well self, there is all these new peps who wouldn’t know a Cometa Z1 clone from a bump on the head, so in the end I think I made the right decision and just posted them here and shared the good find and I probably saved myself a loss of a lot of money, what if you spent $5K on these really very good clones and no one would buy them and then because I thought I was being sneaky with my find and thinking I might make a buck or five, instead now everyone is mad at you for even bringing these to everyone’s attention and then hating you forever, that would be a real bummer… ha ha
Oh well, I think this thread went really well and there was no fighting and we didn’t get shut down like 90% of the threads that even mention these clones or the word Cometa, and really just using the word cometa should get an immediate hit on your RUDE button… ha ha ha

TKS; I learned a lot from this thread.

“I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty, as perhaps you know, was in constructing the carbon filament, the incandescence of which is the source of the light.” - Thomas Edison.

link if pos to the lantern!

I think you’re way over thinking this whole thing .

T18it’s not like anyone needs to baby sit a thread on blf . The best of them have lives of their own .

This light is worth it’s weight in parts alone .

The worst part of the cometa was the commentas. Its a damn light . At some point talking about a peice of aluminum gets really damn dumb . Your thread was a perfect one .. a deal alert . Great deal great light .. liability be damned , all conversation that wasn’t helping was just blather.

OK so heres my helpful hint .. the 18650 adapter doesn’t work at all and the battery just slopps around . But .. if you have a U torch ut01 it makes a cute diffuser wand .. add a cap off a water bottle to the top if you like and bingo boingo instant diffuser.

Probably fits 100 different AA lights as well

Plenty of people had varied and interesting bad experiences first time around, and nothing much has changed since.

Pardon ? re-sale value ? That’s not why I buy a torch. And I think you might be dreaming if that’s your primary motive. I know a few have been filling their boots in the anticipation of profitry, and are proud to tell us. That’s their business decision.

I’m not sure what you hope to achieve there. Wim and I had good communications with Jaxman during the host buy, he was exasperated but had seemingly little recourse to Chinese intellectual property law, so all he could do was banish Banggood forever.

By the way, Banggood still have 126 pieces of 1A left in the UK warehouse. All the 3As disappeared overnight, a few days ago.

It was the obvious way to fix the “shorting out the LED wires on the black disc” problem, along with the other plastic washers to avoid shorting the cell, toasting the springs, etc.

Sticking on bits of Kapton tape works, but this is better. Except that it is not. Sloppy tolerances, misalignment (with no way to secure, unless you can drill and tap), loose lenses that slop about, LED spacers that aren’t quite right, etc. etc.

I suspect that someone at BG (Neal ?) got carried away and signed a contract for a lot of these clones, anticipating huge sales, but when it turned out to be so bad and word got out, they’ll have been stuck with them ever since. A whole lot had to be sent back for re-work after the initial disastrous reception. Perhaps follow-on deliveries included factory-made fixes.

Banggood have only stopped calling it the Cometa (which it is), because the name is so toxic. After all, it is engraved into the bezel, along with the date 2016.

OK, Thanks, anything else…?

Their loss, our gain?

Hell, I’d order a few more at 15bux…

(Even the 1As.)

Dream on. Currently £21 from UK, £38 from China. Presumably the same stock, just shifted around. As before. Don’t encourage them.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, the real deal doesn’t cost much more than this and will be a better experience, unless you are a masochist with a modding obsession.
.
It was a weird bit of madness by Banggood/Manker, but they also had a lot of rapidly dating unloved stock to shift. I very much doubt that they sold it below cost price to them at $15. Break-even, probably.

Thanks T18 for drawing this to our attention. But it seems that any discussion of the Cometa can go rapidly off the rails. Perhaps it is cursed.

Lucky you who have scooped up the $15 bargains, I agree that that was a difficult price to resist. But you are still left with a Cometa, at the end of the day.

Well, that’s kinda when it starts getting dark, so…

Still, no real complaints. Nice even blanket of light when pulled in, decent Bat Signal when pushed out, pretty bright (drew a smidge under 2.8A from a 4.0V “DE” cell as measured on my clampmeter), tolerable UI, looks like pretty good quality hardwarewise, so like I said, no complaints.

If I’d side-by-side one with a real honest-to-B’harni (pbuh!) Z1, sure, I could probably pick apart any deficiencies in the ZoomieWhichShallNotBeNamed. But for 15bux, even with BG’s misbehavior, I ain’t complaining.

The light rocks even with all these minor defects overblown BS. If you’re a modder you hardly EVER leave ANYTHING stock for long anyway so if the flash HAD been equal to the Z1 to start with it STILL would’ve been improved, tightened up, etc.

EVERY flash I’ve ever bought needs some ‘improvement’, upgrade, etc.

To some it’s just a great host at a great price. To others they’re in hog light heaven already.

Shoulda bought 19 more actually. :laughing:

You still can. Plenty left. But the price has changed.

So, what do you really think this thing is worth ? Today ? Serious question. Economics 101.

And no, it is not the sum of it’s parts.

By the way, what do you plan to do with your stash, if it is delivered ? I am curious. And if you do buy another 19 and fix them up, how do you plan to price them, altogether ? Surely that can only work once they are all gone, and a mystique is created, which has not happened yet, though I already detect a lot of talking-up the thing to become an unrecognised rare jewel.

Buy buy buy …


Mine had a shipping delay.

To original OP, No, but the runningwithoutlightsblackhelicopter came hovering above when I was looking at whitetails chasing doe out in the brush country!

“In PHILADELPHIA this watch is worth $50 bucks.”

Do ya know what movie this line came from?

:student:

(TP.)

Wait. I wanna see if TT knows.

Trading Places.

Though I cheated and Googled it, never having watched the film.

:wink:

Back in the ’80s I had several friends who went into “The City” though they could have been superb engineers, mathematicians, physicists. All burned out now, like me, but much much much wealthier.

Well ya prolly figured out why I quoted the line .

When ya ask me what do I think it’s worth it all depends on what someone is willing to pay me. So to answer your question directly, I have no idea since I haven’t offered up one for sale and no one has PM’d me and offered me a price they’ll pay.

I have had though two PM’s that are INTERESTED to know if I’m considering selling. Which I’m not.

I guess that’s a fairly good sign of demand if my recollection of Econ 101 serves me correctly?

:student: :+1: :beer:

Ps. You should watch the movie. There are some actual valuable undertones that bear worthy attention.

Ya see?

This is watt The Fever does to people. The only cure for this terrible malady is hard core deprogramming, cut off of credit cards, and group therapy sessions following the well proven 12-Step Program offered by Flashaholics Anonymous.

We hope for a speedy and sane recovery.