- The Fake-Cree LED Awareness Thread - The new "low" in Budget lights.

And this one is creepy, a two-led bicycle lamp for just 19 dollar, with no mention of Cree, brand name is N/A, but the leds in the pictures look XP-L alright. But I can not find a convincing counterfeit XP-L in the Latticebright collection.

yet..

http://www.dx.com/nl/p/xp-l-v5-2-led-2000lm-5-mode-cool-white-bike-light-bicycle-lamp-black-light-green-396827#.VdGQQhp1FDs

Confirmed: The GearBest Camo-SK68 has fake CREE LEDs. Boy, am i angry about that! They always refused my complaints about the horrible tint and poor output They wrote, their manufacturer claimed the tints are on par with “their” specs. They only offered some minuscule refund, which i finally accepted. Should have made a full refund reclaim via paypal, for fraud product… :frowning:

Hmm, I’ve already dedomed my gearbest sk68. The tint is better but not sure about the throw. The dome didn’t fall off as easy as it usually does with cree leds, but if it had a fake led that might explain why…

Just this morn I got a full PP refund from GB on fake 18650 AWT cells - I'm in shock btw... Took lots of goin back-n-forth, but they finally gave in just before I was escalating it to a claim. Polite insistence, polite threats - think they understood it finally. GB is great at whining about their 1,000's of product listings they can't confirm specs on, and 1,000's of submitted daily reviews they can't get to posting (only time for positive reviews I guess).

Yeah, I got one of those “camo” SK68s too. Trash-binned the emitter immediately. Even the aluminum looks bad, more like pot metal.
I figured it was just a lottery loss, but I guess it was — what’s the word for it? Bait and switch, I guess, at a mediocre level. When you expect a junky clone, but get something worse than you expected.

I got a couple of the camo's from GB too - was gonna swap the LED's anyway, but the paint on the body doesn't bode well for any decent level of amps. It's clearly paint - can tell from the inside. Feels like a rubberized coating almost, it's so thick. Not used to seeing it on flashlights.

The 2-banded die ones are something i never seen before, as you mentioned they could be knock-off LG / 3535.
The lower 10-pack almost look like warm White XT-E or XB-D emitters.

Hi, Tom:
Can you give me some advises or references about how to swap replace the LEDs in these SK68 imitations and where and which LED I should get? I just don’t want to play lottery again!

..or this Latticebright TD one:

!{width:100%}http://www.latticebright.com/UpLoadFiles/file/TD(4).jpg!

Try the first result on this page: Search results for '' - BudgetLightForum.com
Pictures there should tell you what you need to do.

(that’s the result using the Search box, upper left corner of each page — it searches this site. You can resort by date on that page.

Lots of options. Hank's search reference is good. I'm planning on using up a bunch of colored XP-E2's I have, but also like XP-G2's, XP-L's, etc. Similar mods on the "slim AA zoom" light, some info here: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/21936, one of my mods in post #51. Keeping the stock driver, or low amps, then you can probably stay with an aluminum MCPCB. Copper MCPCB would probably have to be sanded down to get it in focus, but again, lots of options for mounting, driver, etc.

Mitko probably has more available XP-E2's here: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/31537, but qty 10 minimum, but cheap, good quality. Must be reflowed though.

Thanks to Hank and Tom_E. I will try to see what I can do.
The XP-E2s look good also. However, it has no PCB. I don’t know how difficult to reflow. The most confident work I did was to resolder 8 pin flash. I also did replace rams but with mixed results.

Paste this into the Search box:

how difficult to reflow

(the search navigation changes to look like this):

http://budgetlightforum.com/search?q_as=how%20difficult%20to%20reflow

(don’t worry about the %20 — that’s just copying out of the navigation window, it’s what Search does with spaces in the plain text you paste in
That will get you answers.
Remember you can also change result view from ‘relevant’ to ‘date’ to see newest first

Hank: Thanks.
I will give up the reflow idea. Maybe just some LEDs already mounted on stars.
Aside from LED, another issue is the driver. I checked a few of my SK-68 collection. I found the current varies widely. The best one I have, an old (likely genuine) SK-68, takes about 2A current from a Enerlop AA battery. All others takes less than 1.6A. It looks like the light emitted is proportional to the current. (It is obvious I guess for the same LED.) Do you or anyone else have any suggestions for the driver circuits with good output current?
Thanks.

Some of the (fake) SK68s do not have slots to take them apart. The one you pointed out here SK68 Emitter swap BOGUS looks like it. However, I was not able to disassemble it.

Has anyone spotted any counterfeit/Latticebright XP-G emitters in the wild? I recently purchased a 5-pack of “XP-G” emitters for a remarkably low price from one of the big overseas sellers. On installing three of them in a triple host, I found that the output was very poor, and with a horrible green tint. I immediately pulled and discarded the three I had just installed, then reflowed other emitters onto the same boards.

I’ve got a couple of the nasty emitters left, but I only have a single known-genuine XP-G emitter to compare against (from an old Manafont-purchased Ultrafire single-mode P60 dropin). Superficially, they look very much the same…

I have the same exact light. I had to pry out the driver first and then push the mcpcb out from the back. I had to give it some pretty good taps around the sides with a small punch. Eventually i was able to work it out that way.

sadly that’s going to become the painful reality now even with buying bare and flowed emitters from overseas sellers, is that most of them may end up being these crap, low-output, horrible tint Latticebright style knock-off garbage leds.

Do you need to unscrew the aluminum cylinder that surrounds them first?
Also anybody know what is HT-PE marked on the LED star? (Edit: I found it from some previous post. It is a fake Cree XP-E. :frowning: )

Another fake cree XP-E
Appears to have that hole in the corner other fakes have but this one keeps the phosphor only on the die.
Why I will never buy from TMART again post# 6