Gasket = o-ring
Yes
Because I took from the backup FW3A, otherwise there was a rattle 
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 
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.
…and I add a FW3A, just because… well I love carrying multiple flashlights.
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)
We don’t really have to guess. Some of our more talented reviewers made equipment for measuring intensity vs beam angle. For example, in maukka’s FW3A review, there are detailed measurements of how the beam is shaped with three common optics:
The 10507 is more or less equivalent to a SMO reflector… and the 10511 is essentially the same thing but frosted (similar to OP) so it blends the beam together a bit. I greatly prefer the smoother 10511 beam.
- Smooth reflector = ringy beam, sharp edges, visible artifacts
- OP reflector or frosted optics = smooth beam, gradual slopes, subtle or no artifacts
The effect of an OP reflector or frosted optic is very similar to running a Gaussian blur filter over the beam, and that’s a good thing… unless you want sharp edges.
In any case, that’s not what causes the “fried egg” effect. The XP-L HI beam is still more intense at the center, even when it looks like a fried egg… it just has a visible tint shift there due to the way it emits different frequencies at different angles. It’s not nearly as bad about this “Cree rainbow” effect as most LEDs, but it still happens somewhat. The warmest frequencies go out the sides of the LED, where they bounce off the reflector and end up in the center of the hotspot.
The effect is usually most visible with a large smooth reflector, but it can also be seen even in the non-frosted Carclo optics. Here are those same results, but showing CCT by angle instead of intensity. This is the egg yolk effect:
Regardless, I almost always prefer a smooth change of intensity from the hotspot to the outer edge of the spill. It doesn’t have to be a linear change, but I like to avoid the appearance of any sharp edges. The plateau-shaped beam in the “quick-n dirty Paint” pic above doesn’t really appeal to me.
I liked the FW1A’s beam with XP-L HI… it was very nice. But it was too throwy for my purposes, so I modified it. The effect was very similar to what is shown in the intensity-vs-angle graph above, going from 10507 to 10508. It went from ~22 cd/lm down to about ~10 cd/lm, which made the hotspot wider and less intense. And I’m pretty happy with the result. I wanted ~10 or ~12 cd/lm, and that’s what I got.
From what I've experienced so far, the ringy beam usually, if not exclusively comes from the emitter's centering ring, height not properly adjusted, lens reflecting the emitter back into the reflector ofc at different angles, the bezel holding the glass lens in place if it's glossy instead of matte and other small, overlooked factors like these. The artifacts that I've seen related to the reflector and here it applies both to SMO and OP, where the OP is hiding them to some extent, because.. that's what the OP reflector is intended to do, are the flower petal corona, or depending on the depth and centering alignment different other shape variations, uneven Hot-Spot brightness, accentuated tint-shift (with some OP reflectors I've found the tint-shift to be not only noticeable, but considerably more pronounced than with the very slightly different shaped but compatible SMO counterpart reflector and some other times with a SMO reflector the tint shift would be basically more pronounced and separated completely from the Hot-Spot, all in the Corona)
All in all, I would say that the reflector geometry, emitter alignment, emitter / reflector size ratio (in fact reflector angle vs emitter size would be the more relevant ratio here.. ) are playing the most relevant part in the beam quality and even to some extent in the tint shifting.
All of the 3 TIR's in the intensity/angle graph that you've presented are nothing like what I like my beam patterns to look like, I can see very little to no plateau in the center 5 ~ 10 degrees and the slope is too gradual all around, also the spill is negligible.
EDIT: In fact, to cut the long story short, I've got a pretty good representation of a beam pattern/shape comparison in the picture on the "white" wall in my previous post. I very much like the one Hot-Spot on the right (SMO) which is.. spot on, VS the one on the left (OP) which I don't like one bit. And to understand what sharp, defined and homogeneous means to me, that's pretty much it, the beam on the right side nearly perfect. Maybe it lacks a bit of detail because of the limited color range of the camera. But, as you could probably notice, there's no artifacting going on, no ringing and no crazy sharp edges to speak of. And the setup it's a plain emitter in a SMO reflector, no difuser, no blurring or anything alike, because there was absolutely no need for them. Big Hot-Spot was obtained simply by the small and wider angle reflector (I'd say it's about a 20 degrees angle reflector in this particular case)
What exactly are those two lights?
The one on the left is a Lumintop EDC05 standard OP reflector, XP-L HD and the one on the right is the Sofirn SP10S on which I've swapped the original OP reflector to the SMO one from the older SP10A revision and it runs a LH351D (reason for the lesser tint shifting)
Both reflectors are the same geometry and they would be interchangeable if it weren't for the deeper cut on the outside on the EDC05 (deeper border on the Sofirn's reflector and deeper cut on the head)
Of course. The primary characteristics of the emitter and optics play the largest role. But I thought the point being made was that, all other things being equal, with SMO vs OP as the only difference, you are disappointed that the FW1A uses OP instead of SMO.
That preference is totally fine; each person looks for different things in a light. The FW1A reflector is a good design though. It works well, aside from one visible ring outside of the spill area. There is also a mild Mach band effect at the outer edge of the spill. But the hotspot is nice and smooth with a fairly decent blended corona around it. And the spill is bright enough to provide some useful wider context without wasting a lot of light. Lumintop did a pretty good job with the FW1A optics.
Those are usually caused by two things:
- Large square emitters in well-focused small round reflectors (corona petals)
- Overlapping reflectors like on the SP36 (spill area petals)
If the LED is smaller, or the reflector is bigger, there is less flower petal pattern. Or if the reflector is defocused or blurred slightly, there is less flower petal pattern.
Lots of things can cause rings in the beam. You listed several of those things. There are a lot of ways optics can go wrong. 
However, the sharp edges from precise optics can also be considered rings. Extremely well-focused reflectors tend to have mach bands between different parts of the beam, and that effect can be undesirable.
Apologies for going on a tangent. I find this stuff kind of fascinating. Here’s a visual summary of what a Mach band is:
In the graph you created for an egg yolk beam, it looks like the brightness is highest at the edges of the hotspot and slightly lower in the middle… like turning a soda can upside-down so the the concave bottom is on top. That mild donut hole effect is commonly perceived with well-focused smooth reflectors.
But in general it’s not actually dimmer in the middle. It’s an optical illusion caused by the mach band effect. In order to look flat like a plateau, the hotspot needs to be brighter in the middle and have somewhat more rounded edges. A truly flat center looks like it’s less bright in the middle.
As an example, here is a rendering of a beam with a perfectly flat hotspot and a perfectly flat spill area, with linear transitions between:
It appears to have a mild donut hole effect, but it is only an illusion.
Of course, virtually no lights actually achieve this degree of flatness. But the effect is still present and somewhat visible even with the edges rounded off a bit. For a beam whose hotspot appears flat, it’ll be shaped more like a round hill or a slice from the top of a sphere.