Lumintop FW1A discussion and review

Gasket?

It should have these parts, stacked in this order:

  • Bezel
  • O-ring
  • Lens
  • Reflector
  • Centering ring
  • MCPCB with LED

There is no gasket.

From the pics you posted, your FW1A appears to have the correct parts.

What a great collection!
This leads me to want the FW1A :weary: :stuck_out_tongue:

Funny, I was going to say it leads me to want a D1 and two Zebralights.

Before that picture, I thought the Unicorn was shorter and narrower. I assumed it was the size of a SC64.

Maybe he means the o-ring between the bezel and lens?

Gasket = o-ring

Yes

Because I took from the backup FW3A, otherwise there was a rattle :smiley:

These orings are a bit too small and too thick: https://www.fasttech.com/p/1088607

Hi all,

I’ve been introduced here by stephenk from a post on Light Painting Blog.

As a lightpainter, from what I’ve read, I think FW1A is one of the best flashlight to have in our arsenal. Especially because of Andúril and its new momentary strobe feature.

Could someone tell me if the FW1A has the new July update of Andúril firmware?
I read FW3A/1A drivers aren’t updated yet by Lumintop…

Thanks

ToyKeeper probably knows, is there any way I can check? I know this version has the two stage lockout, but no factory reset.

I’ve only tried one FW1A, but it has momentary strobes. I think almost all FW3A / FW1A lights are shipping with a version new enough to include that now.

Checking is relatively simple… go to a strobe mode (“click, click, hold” from off), then turn the light off, then go to momentary mode (5 clicks from off) and press the button.

Getting out of momentary mode is a bit inconvenient on FW3A/FW1A though, since it requires disconnecting power. And on this light, that means unscrewing the battery tube pretty far. It’s much easier to exit momentary mode on other lights, like the Emisar D4.

The button placement may also be a consideration when choosing a light. Side switch or tail switch may be more convenient, depending on what you’re doing.

Just received this light today and I absolutely love it. Great beam profile with the SST 20. One advantage of throwy reflector lights I’ve noticed is in tail standing to create diffuse light in a room. The candle mode in anduril is much more effective this way than with optics. Perfect for late night reading.

Welcome to BLF , Frazil .

Ok. So there’s no manual momentary mode yet (your July update), but there is momentary stobes. I can easely live with that. Thanks for your help and your reply!

About the button placement: yup you’re absolutely right. That’s why I rather choose tail switch button flashlight. Because we often attach some sort of light diffuser (e.g. plexiglass) onto the head causing side switch difficult to reach.

Thanks for your quick reply bmengineer. Useful tip.

Thanks a lot :wink:

The momentary mode supports regular (steady) output or anything in the strobe group (party strobe, tactical strobe, bike flasher, candle, lightning).

What it doesn’t have is “manual memory”, which makes the regular ramping mode start at the same brightness every time. Instead, it has only “automatic memory”, which uses the last-ramped level. Newer versions allow switching between these two. But that probably isn’t relevant for light painting, and doesn’t affect momentary mode.

You’re right. Thanks for this information.
Cheers

Edit:
FW1A is on the way. :wink:
…and I add a FW3A, just because… well I love carrying multiple flashlights. :smiley:

Finally!

The proper version of this light with so little thermal mass. Only.. Why only OP reflector ? Why no SMO.. ? Beats me to death.. :| Small emitter and OP reflector, makes no sense to me.

I was very much excited when the Lumintop rep on AE told me about the EDC18 that was based on the FW3A - that made me think that Lumintop does consider options and variations.

I've just replied that I'm not too much interested into triples, or multi emitter lights in small formats due to low thermal mass and that I would take a single emitter variant any time,

even at the expense of a shorter cell fueling it, like an 18500/18350 if size constraints are imperative.

Not too many minutes ago just randomly found and watched a review on YT about the FW3A and somewhere in the review, the 21700 and single emitter variations of the FW3A were mentioned - moment of awe!

Ofc, I went straight to Google and typed in Lumintop FW1A - low and behold.. the unexpected (but hoped for.. ) happened! Hurray!

Only when I've got to any of the shops selling them.. there had to be a shortcoming.. ONLY... OP reflector as a choice!.. :| Not nice, really a bummer as far as I'm concerned.

Hopefully Lumintop will consider having an SMO reflector as an option for the FW1A any time soon tho :)

Yay!

Why? I’ve never seen any testing proving that smooth reflectors give noticeably more throw, and the lead to more beam artifacts. With the smaller LEDs used here, this light already is quite throwy.
Lumintop actually considered both options, I suggested they pick OP if they had to choose just one.

I haven't mentioned the small emitter and SMO reflector combo in relation to the throw ability, just the beam pattern, well, more like.. the "Hot-Spot pattern" if I could call it so.. the Hot-Spot shape, definition. The smaller the emitter, the fuzzier the Hot-Spot. Indeed, the OP reflector will smooth out the whole beam, but at a cost. And for me that's not the cost of the throw, but the smoothed out Hot-Spot, which with a small emitter it's even more pronounced than say a bigger emitter like an XHP50 / XHP70 for example. I'll always take some artifacting and a sharp, defined, homogeneous Hot-Spot over an overall smooth beam. That being not talking about outer ringing artifacts or other such unwanted beam "elements" which have nothing to do with the reflector being OP or SMO Anyways. Having an OP reflector it's like applying a post-processing blur pass over a CGI image in order to mitigate aliasing.. instead of using an actual antialiasing process. You end up losing all relevant detail in the picture by the time the blur is strong enough to make a difference in alleviating the unwanted aliasing. It's pretty much the same with the beam on a flashlight. I just like it sharp and crisp, with a homogeneous Hot-Spot especially and regarding artifacting, that shouldn't be there in the first place on a quality well though light. If there's artifacts in the beam, then something has been poorly designed, either the reflector geometry, the emitter's centering tolerance, the protective glass lens, the bezel holding it in place, or any other such elements that I'm not probably aware of. OP reflector really isn't anything but a strong gaussian blur applied to an HD image as far as I'm concerned. Nothing in relation to throw, regardless of what degree it affects it.

EDIT:

Oh and another thing that someone's already mentioned before, and nothing new in the flashlights world, if I'd ever want a smoother overall beam, it's very easy to add some form of diffusion to the light's beam, being it a film over the lens, or a rubber/silicone cap, or whatever else that would work, the option is always there. Not so much an option to sharpen the beam back, (Hot-Spot especially) when you have an OP reflector to begin with. Even a ceiling/wall/floor bounce would help if you need any diffuse/ambient lighting and you don't have any difuser on you in any such situations where you would need it, it's just handy in any situation, just point the light in a different direction than what you need to lighten up and you have ambient/diffuse light, even more so that you would have with an OP reflector. So, basically an OP reflector really isn't like.. "needed".. other than for plain aesthetic purposes, just so one could say the beam pattern is smooth/er than it was before - note that for any given artifact, the artifact would still be there, but just blurred out - e.g. outer ringing - thus smoothing out the whole beam, isn't that effective in the first place, just makes the beam more.. "bland", less eye-popping let's say, definitely not adding up anything to it. It's like instead of cleaning the mud that the children left on the kitchen floor when they've entered the house straight from the garden on a rainy day, you would take the dry mop and just spread the mud as evenly as you can across the entire floor's surface, that's all an OP reflector is.

That’s backward. Larger emitters make fuzzier hotspots. Smaller emitters make more defined hotspots. A single-point light source makes the sharpest edge possible.

In practice, it usually comes down to the size ratio between the reflector and the emitter. Bigger reflector and/or smaller emitter makes for a tighter, cleaner hotspot. Smaller reflector and/or bigger emitter makes for a looser, fuzzier hotspot.

That may be a somewhat unusual preference. As far as I can tell, it’s much more common to prefer a smooth flashlight beam over a beam with sharp edges. The usual tradeoff people must decide is where to place the balance between making the beam throw and making the beam look pleasing.

The FW1A uses an OP reflector to make the beam look a bit nicer and eliminate the “fried egg” beam issue with XP-L HI… and it works. It doesn’t seem to reduce throw enough to be a problem though. If anything, I found it was too throwy even with the OP reflector. I probably would have added some DC-Fix to blur it a bit more, except my FW1A had a cool white LED… so I swapped the LED instead.

What I wanted to say was a smaller emitter VS a larger emitter with an OP reflector (let's say the emitter/reflector size ratio would be the same)

With a small emitter, even the slightest imperfections in the reflector would smooth out/spread the Hot-Spot edge sharpness

If you found the FW1A being a bit throwy, that could be because the Hot-Spot (with the OP reflector) instead of being homogeneous, thus, center to edge the same brightness (egg-yolk tint shifting aside) it's faded way more from the center to the edge, (compared with an SMO reflector) thus producing a more pronounced throw in the very center, apparently making the Hot-Spot smaller and throwier I'd imagine because all of the edge would fade-out much faster with distance than the center of it.

EDIT:

If I'm excused of my quick'n dirty Paint skills.. this is pretty much what I think happens with a small emitter like an XP-L HI and an OP/SMO reflector:

Of course this is a rather gross approximation and exaggeration from my part, just to make the difference more striking..

And this would be how two of my 14500 lights with the same (exactly the same) geometry reflector, one OP, one SMO and same emitter size, thus same emitter/reflector ratio are looking like:

Of course, disregard the brightness that was manually matched, the tint and likely the tint-shift on the left - What I only wanted to portray here is just the beams patterns..

OP on the Left / SMO on the Right (my preference being.. Right)