New brand of 1xAA XP-? R5 3-mode on DX - Eastward YJ J609

If you own the Trustfire R5-A3 and you truly want "insanely bright", you need to try it on 14500's. To my eyes and others, it becomes about twice as bright.

Agree, and now others are catching on to the same thing. XP-E and lack of 14500 support kills it for me. Darn! It sure looked like a nice light.

I have brighter - it's close to 3x as bright at switch-on - if I were prepared to push the voltage higher it would just about touch 300 lumens at switch on - it gets 117 or a bit more with an NiMH.

Mine has only had an NiMH in it for testing. It is indeed a real screamer on 14500 and doesn't set fire to your hands like the C3 stainless steel.

After grabbing the image and doing a brutal unsharp mask in Photoshop, it is possible that it is an XP-G - the image is too murky to be certain but there appear to be 4 segments.

There is not really enough data in the image to be certain.

As fran82 said, if there are three dots visible around the die the emitter isn't an XP-G and it wouldn't be the first time DX failed to list correct specs...

The 3 square dots do not lie

Well spotted Fran82.

It's a Xpe and not XPG compare with the trustfire R5-A3

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.39062

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.44460

Whoa, nice catch Fran82! Well, there goes a lot of the appeal of this light. Shame on DX and Eastward YJ for their deceptive advertising. I updated my first post.

Totally agree. Seems this behavior is spreading. Remember LighTake and his Trustfire S A7 with a R5,

which was nowhere near a R5. And now this. Shame on DX, LT and all the others who use deceptive

adverticing. Good we have this forum where the reality comes to light.

Looking forward to a review of this, seems like a nice alternative to Maratac AA, at a reasonable price. Strobe

I actually cancelled my order when I found out about the deceptive advertising of the claimed XP-G emitter at DX. The company (Eastward) appears to be willing to do custom modifications, we'll see if we can work something out with them.

OK, will be interesting that. And, another thing: I cant find this model in the eastward website ¿why?

Yes, I was looking for the model on their website, and I can't find it either. Appears to be very new. I searched all over Google, and I couldn't even find it on the chinese trading sites.

My guess would be that they regard their consumer facing website as a very low priority. Their real customers are the HK distributors, not us end users. They probably have a private B2B website where they deal with the Hong Kong guys. I wonder if they have made more than a few prototypes of these yet.

I strongly suspect that specs of things they think might sell get released to the Hong Kong guys and if they are interested then they start making the lights. I have ordered several lights from DX on the day they were announced that never got shipped. I suspect they never got made.

But this could easily be wrong - I have no idea of what actually goes on in those Hong Kong distributors..

To be honest I don't think you/we'll be able to agree upon a good deal. I think we are talking about 20-100 lights they would be able to sell to us. I can't imagine they would do such a small custom batch. Plus the shipping would probably kill the deal anyways, I think not everybody in HK/PRC can ship as cheap as DX. The negotiations would need to take place via DX, and they probably couldn't care less...

DX, no, you're right that they are too big. But there are a lot of small-guy Chinese sellers that DO want to get their foot in the door, I'm sure they'd be willing to permanently offer this model and ship it to us for free. Look at all the eBay sellers that ship for free, most of them are just private drop-shippers from China. And if it's available, believe me it will be POPULAR. We'll have far more people than the current BLF members asking inquiring about this I think if it ever comes to fruition.

Not on the website yet as its so new ....

As for the deal ? Many including DX , build up an order , and then bring in the lights to meet customer orders , some times the manufacturer does not have the item , and you wait ..

You wait because it needs to be manufactured , then shipped to DX to fulfill there oder[s]

It would be interesting to see an expression of interest from members for a 3 mode [ Hi-Med-Lo ] version , and then see if Lightake ? is interested in supplying demand .

I will never buy a 3 mode Hi-lo-strobe , never never ... Anyhow ... Would anyone be interested in a Hi-med-lo version ? [ I would ]

Actually I would kind of prefer it to be:

Moonlight low (1 lumen)

Low (6 lumens)

Med (40 lumens)

Maximum (150 lumens on NiMH)

And personally think that the low mode should come first, because if it defaults to 100% High, it won't turn on at all when the battery is really low. What do you guys think?

Here's a poll for this idea: http://budgetlightforum.cz.cc/node/592

Mine has shipped at last. Wonder what it will actually have in it when it arrives?

Huh, that took long enough. They must have waited to begin manufacturing until there were enough orders, as you mentioned.