Could easily be someone who was in and copied the facility Cree has too…
I feel that we will be safe for the time being to expect established brands like Olight, Nitecore, Fenix, Sunwayman, 4sevens, etc. will still come with premium CREE emitters, but those one-off brands & over-cloned lights, (all the various *fire brands, etc.) will soon be showing up with unknown, low-cost LED emitters with little QC ( and already may be using them)
Those close-ups of those counterfeit-emitters are quite convincing…
In the past we’ve seen dodgy drivers in some cheaper torches, and now we need to contend with fake LEDs too.
The fakes are very similar in appearance. The XM-L2 would be an easy one to mistaken
The chinese do have led factories.
I agree on all counts, it seems to be the way they do business (and is not caused by their government as someone else said).
This really sucks though, fake Cree emitters that are hard to tell from the genuine article, i wonder if there is anything Cree can do to combat this.
Jk :bigsmile:
I decided some time ago to buy only premium lights, olight etc. Sometimes there are bargains to be had. $44 for an olight warrior, $18 for a Skilhunt x0 are just some examples. It is not worth taking the risk buying more budget lights, by time you mod it, it ends up being more expensive.
I recently went against my own instinct and bought a convoy that was fake and someone pointed out they also had fake drivers! Now with the possibility of fake LEDs as well. No thanks!
Marc
My problem with premium lights (besides cost) is their damn love of threadlocker glue! Evil!
LOL. I used to mod lights but by time you spent the money for a new driver, new LED you could be in for a few bob! And of course the host aren’t as good quality as a branded light.
Marc
The demand has been right here on the forum at times (rare times of course), I see here images of flashlights made by someone and requested to be cloned or copied, so the demand is sometimes blatant, like when you read posts that say something like: I am looking forward to a cheap clone of this light. While nothing seems to have been too serious, you know "clones" usually have some detail different to feel good you did not clone it 1:1.
There is always a possibility that cree is actually selling b-grade,factory rejects,etc. to Chinese companies,and makes some extra money on "junk".
The we end up buying those “junk” factory rejects.
Can this be called attack of the clone?
As far as I know this is clothing industry thing where ultra expensive brands can be found for cheap due to defects at various stores, but those are upfront due to low production numbers, I mean it is understandable.
If CREE would do that then that would be high scale, destroying 5000 emitters is not a big deal, but in order for CREE to make any sense selling factory rejects they would have to sell huge numbers, 50,000pcs?
Nichia and CREE have sued several Taiwanese companies for patent infringement, I have not yet seen any law suit against Chinese companies.
I think you're under estimating cree's LEDs production/sale by a factor of at least 10000.
50000pcs is 50 reels and maybe 100 000$.
No, just choosing some random numbers that would be appealing to middlemen, 50,000 a month.
The point of cloning a product is after all at home in China. A Chinese company may even intentionally request such batches for buying them at a lower price, rather than CREE asking people around to distribute them.
What we need to do is be able to tell the difference. Those Latticebright LEDs are very similar to the real thing. I would hate to put out a review in which I mistakenly identified counterfeits as genuine.
Who has received these counterfeits? Can you please share with us how to tell them apart? Is there a way?
Even if they are not 100% clones they can still appear as CREE LEDs, remember the XP-L fakes (not actual clones), I believe even to his days those flashlights sell like hotcakes.
Oh boy.
