Thank you for your observation. I’m an amateur at identifying fakes. I’m about to drop a couple thousand dollars on lights and don’t want to be taken for a fool.
Very Helpfull thread,thanks!
have some old XM-L same package as original and bond wires
but die size a bit smaller than the authentic
will post photos soon
Looks fake to me. The substrate on that is white, but on a real XM-L2 it’s black. Even the fake emitters getting decent so as long it works fine I wouldn’t worry about it being genuine or not.
I was curious so I bought a XM-L T6 on a starboard from digikey (shouldn’t be fake right?). I installed it into the flashlight and guess what? The T6 was about 160 flux while the U3 from the light was about 200 flux from about 6 feet away. So I guess these are either real or very good fake.
Is it possible that these LB’s are actually using CREE’s chip, but has worse implementation (i.e. lower quality substrate, lower grade gold wires, worse quality phosphors, etc.)?
I also have a gut feeling that LB may be cutting corner by using the blue LED chip meant for XP-Gs in the XML-like body and try to pass it off as XM-L. Of course, that results in lower overall efficiency.
But the 3amp 6v driver is perfect for an MT-G2 if you drop one of those in and swap out the cruddy plastic lens with a glass one, you get a good few more lumens and the light runs way cooler also decent run time on half decent 26650’s
one indicator of fake is sloppy die attach.
a mature manufacturing process like cree’s wont have that.
that sloppy attach increases thermal resistance.
so far even if the rest of the device looks spot on the poor build quality gives it away.