Unpopular Flashlight Opinion Thread

Wrong. QTC is example of a ramping UI that involves neither clicking nor waiting.

Yes, it is.

You are right but ramp up and down several times in a raw and report back if you have lower brightness immediately. I remember QTC experiments done here and I remember that you had to wait for the QTC material to recover from compression before having lower brightness. :stuck_out_tongue:

Just checked. As far as I can tell, it ramps down immediately. Maybe because construction of the light that I tried (CRX mod) prevents overcompression.
QTC is very finicky around firefly mode but othat than this - the only feature I miss in QTC lights is battery check.

You know that in the first place it was a joke about the more and more popular anduril/narsil ramping UI that involve a switch to work, but if you are considering QTC and rotary, you are right and i’m wrong.
Those UI are brillant in themselves for mimicking/imulating a QTC/rotary, its admirable but sometimes the fact that you have to wait for, then pass and miss the “right” brightness you need : click-hold “oops too much”, click-hold “oops too low”, click-hold…makes it less straight-forward than an UI like Bistro. Too much choice in brightness settings. Then you will say that anduril can be configured with stepped ramping. Darn, ToyKeeper is good at making my joke irrelevant.
But again it was just a joke about smooth ramping UI using a switch.
Well forget it.

This is untrue because no HDS lights are in mokuti. Mokuti is the ugliest thing you could possibly do to a flashlight.

Does this mean when shot by one, you call it love taps?

“Yo m* ize gonna lav tap ya with ma pink Glock” :disguised_face:

[quote=elbakan1]

[quote=BurningPlayd0h]

a) The years their retail side has been open and the immediate response to emails says otherwise. Everyone’s gotta eat and I’m sure the current contract is a great one. This also says nothing about their products for the price.
b) “Very expensive. More than Surefire.” …and a proportionally better product. You get what you pay for and diminishing returns is the name of the game, especially for niche products.
c) Ditto b)
d) Good thing aesthetics are subjective and literally the last consideration for SHTF gear. Again, ditto point b)

Do people actually get excited by, and buy this stuff? Calling this a “new” flashlight should be illegal.

That’s embarrassingly garish, looks like it was painted with corrective liquid and aniline.

Made In The * People’s Republic of China

Its gotta be unpopular for me to love that red, white and blue. Yup, couldn’t care less.

I hate XP-L HI. :smiling_imp:

Last week I went to dinner to a couple of friend’s home. Some dishes like a cassoulet taste better the day after making it (flavors maturation and diffusion) so you need to prepare it the day before inviting friends.
When served, this dish looked absolutely fantastic but when we started to eat it, it had a bad taste of rotten fish and rotten rice. All flavors and aromas were mutated, mutilated.
My friends were out of town for one week and left an old dish in the fridge that they didn’t throw before storing the fresh new cassoulet.

It’s totally fictional but those XP-L HI (and this one in particular (see TM-30-18 tests)) make me think of something like the above. Sure its most obvious and global visual aspect, the tint, looks good but most colors shades are mutated / shifted and also faded (unsaturated)…or “non existant” = desaturated and mutated to the point that 2 differents shades look the same.

Most of the time, a withered but not rotten apple has more taste than a freshly picked and not yet completely ripe apple. This withered apple is just like the SST-20 FB4. It might not be appealing for some people at first because of its sligltly greenish tint, but I will always prefer it because of its deeper, richer colors shades over the unpleasing colors rendition of an XP-L HI, despite its better tint.

Sometimes you need to go through your first impression against a bad tint, to let your eyes and brain get used to it and afterward, being able to more appreciate more subtile things like better colors rendition and richer shades.

I know, a bunch of people will never taste the deep dense aromas and flavors of an expresso made with freshly moulded grains, they can’t refrain to add a sugar to “balance” the first obvious bitter taste, but sugar masks everything more subtile. Just like a lot of people will never be able to appreciate the benefits of an SST-20 FB4. A pity :smiley:

Do I need to make more comparaison with wine’s aromas and flavors ?
Nope, I only see Tint addicts vs CRI addicts.
And then the lumens addicts : “WUT wine ?! I just need this bottle of strong booze to get drunk” gimme those 100 000 lumens.

(Sorry, maybe I’m a bit drunk)

^ Nice analogy! I was thinking about noble rot dessert wine when reading your post… :sunglasses:

Being drunk maybe a good state of mind to vent unpopular flashlight opinions :beer: .
Btw, I agree with the opinion.

Hey, I still like the XM-L (dunno ever having/trying/seeing an -L2) in 4C. Yeah, it’s above the BBL, but still to me looks more “natural” as far as general sunlight balance.

Addendum: that’s behind a TIR lens and not in a reflector (annoyingly fried-eggy).

95% of us could get by just fine with a AAA light or two. We just like to overstate our actual flashlight uses and needs.

I agree with you Tally-ho.

I went jogging in the woods in the dark a few days back and took a XPL hi 5D light with me. So hard to see colors and depth like they should, everything is washed out compared a good HiCri led.

5D is still a nice tint, but only for white wall hunting.

Then I’m in the other 5%, the absolute smallest I can go for as a primary light is AA :stuck_out_tongue:

Yeah the 3D X-PL HIs in my FW3A weren’t very green at all but compared to all the high-CRI lights I have they just made colors look strange. I don’t think them being cooler than most of the lights I have helped either. I never liked the old flourescent lighting that was missing a bunch of the natural spectrum either and that’s exactly what a lot of the average-CRI emitters remind me of (and they did even before running the CRI-snob gamut).