TK's Emisar D18 review -- 3x18650 photon grenade

The D18 has more emitters, so it will be brighter at turn on ;).

… in a no-holds-barred cage match … to the death!

Round Three! Fight!

I think we already know what to expect though. It should be a very bright burst at first, but it’ll get extremely hot and step down quickly to around 2000 or 3000 lumens. The main questions are whether LH351D will fit into these optics, how bright that initial burst might be, and how nice the beam will look. You might have to slice the domes or something before it’ll even come close to fitting.

Actually I did not want to argue. D18 is great and m43 is great flashlight too. Each has many advantages, they are just different device with different features. In some case m43 are more suitable is other D18 .

They fit the E07 just fine and i’ve not seen a TIR that they didn’t look acceptable in. Granted they are super floody but I doubt there is any concern of them fitting or the beam not looking good (if you prefer flood)

The D18’s optics have a significantly smaller inner void than the E07’s optic. The LH351D has a significantly larger dome than the SST-20. So it might fit… but it might not.

XP-L HI works, but it’s flat.

If I measure the pixels in my photos, it looks like the optic probably can’t fit an emitter which uses the full width of the XP pad… and the LH351D uses the full width.

But since no one has tested it yet, it’s still possible that it might just barely fit. I recall the XP-L HD would barely fit into Carclo optics… but it would end up permanently stuck and even a slight bump would cause de-doming. So I’m guessing this might be like that. It can probably be forced on, but it may never come off again.

I see what you mean. I figured since the entire TIR size was larger that it would likely not have a smaller opening but I guess it is possible that is the case.

Has anyone in America received theirs yet? I’m looking at tracking and the light is in the country but USPS doesn’t have a delivery estimate yet.

Well, yeah, those arguments can be valid, might should be valid, but of course it will depend on what I do to get there. :wink: I may add a finned spacer and give it a couple of pounds of thermal mass to work with. Might even go copper. Might use those optics, might not. I may just machine a larger head to screw into the bezel threads and use 20mm 15º optics over all 18 LH351D emitters. :smiley: Or 24 emitters, or however it may work out. Who knows? I kinda tend to do these things on the fly, so even I don’t know where it’s going til it’s gone. :stuck_out_tongue:

Thank you AEDe.

Please explain. Even the newest version of the M43 (approx 8000 lumens) does not make even close to the same amount of lumens as the D18. I cannot find any definition of ansi lumens that would make the M43 outperform the D18.

Even for an 8000 lumen light the M43 is underwhelming, and after reading lots of similar posts I’m far from the only one that feels this way. It does a nice ceiling bounce, but is lacking in real world use. It’s just so floody that it doesn’t throw very far or light up any one thing very much…but it sure does light up a large area! Any of my lights with more lumens (and lots with less lumens but more of a hot spot) seem much brighter and can see a lot further than the M43.

I don’t foresee any measurement, theoretical or otherwise, that is actually going translate to the M43 outperforming the D18 in the real world. I would absolutely love to be shown otherwise. At the moment my M43 has been demoted to my nightstand with a diffuser, due to its nice moonlight mode for reading and long runtime on low. It deserves more, but like others have mentioned, its UI and size are not worth putting up with for me.

ANSI lumens are measured at 30s.

The ANSI lumen figures are certainly not very useful for comparing these two flashlights, both of which are not designed to operated at turbo for very long…. It’s really a silly technicality to point out… And it’s really a useless metric because you could design a flashlight that sustains a brightness level long enough to get a higher rating but immediately has to severely step down right after 30 seconds…

Also I don’t know much about how the thermal step down works but if you started on say 8k lumens on the d18 would it even get a lower ANSI lumen figure than the m43? Is that a stupid question?

It was a joke)
M43 and D18 have about the same mass. So if we start D18 at ~8-9Klm it could show more ANSI lm than D18 at turbo and Meteor at turbo.

Except there is no copper touching aluminum, it’s gold touching aluminum.

My old M43 had issue in that place. After washing it stopped to turn on(it shows power warnig indication) at turbo with fully charged new hidrain 18650. Than I had disassemble it and had seen oxidation between copper board and host. After cleaning it works fine.

The ground from the aluminum host is made by the screws securing the copper board, and these screw holes are gold plated. So there is no ground through an aluminum to copper contact. The copper is clad in masking and the contacts are, you guessed it, gold plated. :wink:

(brass ground screws can up the ante a bit on current draw, just saying)

Thanks for clarifying, but it does not change the essence. This place can have a fairly high resistance due to corrosion. At least in the first batches of M43 it was so. Now the quality of metal working of Henk’s flashlights greatly improved. Maybe something has changed.

Thanks for the response!

Does this need a high drain battery?

For the best performance, yes. I believe 30Qs or VTC6s are recommended. I went with VTC6s, my first set ever.