Starry Light SA-22

Does anyone know the best price on this with international shipping?

WallBuys (don’t like buying from them) has it for $27.85, is there anything cheaper?

I just want to play with it then I’ll probably give it away.

Id like to read proper review before buying it, more so, Black shadow said that someones got one item for review, so far no reviews!

One of my first posts on the board I mentioned I wanted an AA light that was small and bright. Someone said I needed an SA-22. Boy were they right! It’s bright as heck to me as a flood, but still can light up my back garage 80 yards out at night from inside my house through the window. I got mine from someplace called Illumination Supply or something like that. I wish it had a zoom to it, but it still lights up anything that is close enough for my old eyes to see. I’m sorry I don’t know enough, or have enough time to do one of your fancy reviews which I love, but it gets 5 of 5 stars from me for what it is. My only gripe is I wish it didn’t have dumb blinky and SOS modes.

- Joe

Any beam shots would be greatly appreciated! :bigsmile: I still can’t believe no one’s done a review on this light yet. Feels like it’s been talked about for a while now, even with some pictures of it standing next to the PA40, but no review… :_(

there is a simple solution, have one sent to Bort and he will do a review :bigsmile:

Maybe Calvin from IS will read this… :bigsmile: :bigsmile: :bigsmile: I would honestly love to see a full review of this light especially since there are already reviews of the PA40 and LD40. This would most definitely be the preferred choice for us budget folk if it gives comparable performance.

Still looking for the cheapest price on this with free international shipping.

Not keen to buy from Wallbuys as 3 out of 3 orders from them the lights were DOA.

Has anyone seen it for around $27.85 or cheaper?

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

After some serious consideration, I’d advise against buying the Starry Light without taking into account its major design flaw and one other thing; the light can work well, but odds are that you will have trouble with the head screwing on. Tonight, the 3rd - yes, third - straight unit I got and resold was bad. Only, this one was so bad that not even the retaining ring could be fixed. The threads were not made well enough for even one round of use. The guy went to re-fasten the head after charging the batteries and couldn’t get it. I thought it would be a simple fix, but I have it ready now to send back to I.S. for replacement. Calvin responded fast to the situation, but be advised that this item is not without its problems.

So if you get one like this and the retaining ring issue isn’t the cause, then you’ll still have a working light, but the head will just press on and not screw down—which means it may or may not stay in place during normal use and will just pull right off.

I really love this light, but this is a besetting and serious design flaw to be made aware of.

Another smaller consideration:* Runtime test in high mode was completed yesterday by me. You are looking at 27:56 seconds of stable high brightness on good nimh cells. After that, the light provides an additional 10 minutes of fastly diminishing output (diminishing thereafter to nothing). This was with my best (and only worthwhile Energizer cells). The Eneloops test has not been done (yet), but of the 3 people I sold these units to, all ended up recharging them with merely sporadic use—same as my Energizers when they were using Eneloops. So you can expect no more than, say, 40 minutes on high (far from the claimed 2+ hours).

Mild flickering issue also found: This was, however, a one-time thing and I can’t get it to do it again. Just FYI.

Ugh, thanks, Rusty Joe!

So much for all that excitement :D!

Wow..how disappointinig... ::(

Thanks RJ for the heads up.

Wow… that really is disappointing. When you say the threads were not made well enough for even one round of use, do you mean that the plastic body threads were worn down by the aluminum head threads? Or were they just not aligned to begin with? The 30 min runtime on high is also a big disappointment. I wonder how their prediction or test would have yielded over 2 hours… This would’ve been my new light to try out on the next camping trip. Guess I’ll be sticking with my Convoy on the next trip…

I think the second. The threads are not very thick and just don’t catch well. I mentioned this when first plugging this light, but once the retaining issue was handled, I figured that would be the end of it. Well, I was wrong. As far as the runtime test results, I think they combined the capacity of the four Eneloops and figured on a steady 2.8 amp draw. No matter. They were certainly off by a large number.

But I learned something from this (and it should be a lesson to all reviewers here): Never utter anything beyond simple yeh or neh “first impressions” when getting a new light. It is a bad idea to recommend or condemn a light within just hours or days of getting it. The novelty of a thing can get to all of us and cloud our judgment, but time also has a way of factoring into our estimation of a thing’s value — and so it should!

Youre right about that, Rusty Joe!

Ive come to the same conclusion myself in similar fashion - NiteCore i4 V2 turned out to be real crap, missing termination with AAA cells, fragile power cord that broke near the chargers plug and it wasnt even abused, totaly not worth the money.

I wonder if your report has something to do with fact that there is still no real review done by a person, who, according to BlackShadow, was supposed to receive review sample. That person either reported similar faults as you and they pulled the review or, which is also as plausbile as first scenario - this light wasnt evern sent out to anybody to avoid harsh criticism in reviews :D!

4xAA, 880lm => doing the math, 40min runtime on high sounds pretty normal to me.

Now the real question is: Are the lower modes usable, or with bad PWM?

Ps. We are still working with Ric to get a BLF edition of this light with better modes, memory, high PWM, and NW emitter.. But is the build quality so bad that we should stop the GB before it's even started?

the thread issue is bothering me, but i didn’t know about this effort, is there a thread?

Now there is: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/24825

I couldn’t resist the price for this 4*AA light with high lumens. I decided to take my chances with the head threading in hopes that I would be lucky. I should be getting it any day now. I don’t have the equipment to give it a proper review, but I’ll do my best to provide you guys with as many beam shots and pictures as possible.

Thanks, looking forward to it.

This would be awesome, looking forward!

Good review doesnt have to be with scientific battery runtimes and lux output measurement and tailcap measurement of amp draw :D!

Post what YOU like about this light and if beamshots are possible, then what else could we ask :D? Unless you have some other known lights to compare, then beamshots with those lights would be welcome too :D!

I'm gonna need reviews/ reports from multiple sources before I'll even consider thinking about buying this light .

Whoever said " because illumination supply sold it .. meant it was a good light" was talking crazy .

Even causing Calvin to pop in and try to indemnify himself from that idea .

This light imo has gotten way too much good press without anyone even having sufficiently testing it . the Jetbeam pa40's were closed out all over the internet at 30$ and didn't get this much attention .

Rusty Joe above says he's gotten 3 bad ones ?? 3 out of 3 ?? and everyone seems to want to ignore his warnings?

sounds like a trainwreck .

* Orionlight I look forward to your feedback