On The Road i3

Pity to hear that it’s not rainproof, that’s a negative.

How hard is it to get the lens off? I see the notches in the bezel, presumably for twisting?

I found the hidden strobe (3 fast clicks) from any brightness level
— for my use, that is a nice feature. Means it can be a daily carry for pedestrian crossing use.

Comes with a little charger (AC 2-conductor cord, plug socket, and mini-USB socket)
Power and Charge LEDs
Back is labeled
with a patent number
Li-ion: 18650, 17670, 18490, 14500, 16340, 10440
100-240v, 50/60Hz, DC 5V 1A
Output 4.2v plus or minus 1% 0.6A
TEL: 400-670-1003
WEB: www.zlsh.net

Power light is blue, and charge light is blue with no cell, dim red with a cell charging,
Box included a 16340 cell, OTR brand, yellow shrinkwrap, labeled 700 mAh, 2.6 Wh
Not fully charged when shipped (this is good)

2 extra O-rings in a plastic bag, and a slightly stretchy lanyard.
Very cushiony little carrying bag with drawstring

Looking at the shipping label, it says

Return Department
2070 Global Way Ste B
Hebron, KY 41048
That’s a big, big plus if there’s ever a problem, to be able to send it to Kentucky

(It came USPS First Class, International Bridge)


Hm, I’ll try charging the cell and see what the charged resting voltage is.
Charger looks glued together.

Hmmm — left the battery that came with the flashlight in the charger that came with the flashlight, until a while after the red light changed to blue
(not long, could be anytime within an hour or so since I last checked it).

4.28v right off the charger.
I’ll let it settle down a while and see.

EDIT — 4.27v after resting a while. Hmmmm ….

Guess I should check the charger itself, text printed on the back says it ought to be 4.2v plus or minus 1%.

Hmmm, I can’t find a “zlsh.net — anyone recognize that?
(this is for the charger that shipped with the flashlight.
The charger is labeled:

On The Road UC3

Aha, Freeme has mentioned the same charger in a review — it’s also shipped with a different OTR flashlight
and does charge to 4.28v, apparently that’s not unusual.

So-o-o … anyone know a supplier of li-ion 16340s in the chemistry meant to charge to 4.3v instead of the more usual 4.2v?

Now that I’ve got a suitable charger for that chemistry ….

Anyone running a discount code on this OTR i3?

Yup, it was reported before (M3 torch), that the charger it comes with is a piece of crap.

I’m back home, a second i3 was waiting for me so here’s some stock info, using a freshly charged Efest IMR battery, 30 or so seconds after switch-on. It is the XP-G2 version so expect a bit more output for the XM-L2 versions and less throw:

Output:
High (flood) : 320 lm
High (spot) : 100 lm
Med (flood) : 130 lm
Low (flood) : 50 lm
‘Moon’ (fl.) : 5 lm

Throw:
High (spot) : 8 kcd

So the output numbers are lower than in the manual (520,280,90,8), but the throw is spot-on: 8100cd in the manual. For perspective: a sk68 has a bigger lens and a led with smaller die (both help for good throw), on a 14500 it drives the XR-E/XP-E pretty hard and throws 12 kcd. So this little i3 does not do bad at all.

White wall shots:
Nice even flood (pictures exaggerate light level differences compared to perception by eye):

Spot is a bit beyond focus, looks good!:

The slider a tiny bit backwards shows the sharp die focus, a pretty good imaging compared to other glass flashlight lenses I have seen around (plastic lenses used in flashlight are always optically much better):
.
Outside the flood circle (also present in spot setting) is an annoying ring, but that can be reduced to ‘hardly present’ by taking out the lens and blackening the edge with a permanent black marker.

hank,
Have certainly seen other posts where people have had the same issue with the charger over charging which is dangerous!!!

If I remember well, HKJ has posted that charging to 4.3V is not so much dangerous, but it hardly gives you extra capacity and it reduces the lifetime of the battery.

Both readings on the same XP-G2 versions, djozz using an EFEST IMR, I'm using the stock battery, charged but as-is currently:

Output (djozz then mine):

High (flood) : 320 lm -- 337 lm

High (spot) : 100 lm -- 99 lm

Med (flood) : 130 lm -- 131 lm

Low (flood) : 50 lm -- 49 lm

'Moon' (fl.) : 5 lm -- 6 lm

Throw:

High (spot) : 8 kcd -- 9 kcd

Well, we are darn close, not bad for my PVC pipe light box . But of course there's variations between lights of the same specs, plus battery differences, etc.

Nice, it is measurements like these that give me confidence that we at BLF have a grip on light measurements. If you add up all individual potential measurement errors, you end up with an uncertainty that comes pretty close to 100% of the measured value. But despite that, we get within just a few percent of each other, not just in this case but it happened before (I remember getting pretty close too when I and Old Mate measured our HC50’s,
Looking for some calculated Lumen measurements. (Spheres and Tubes) )

Well, it’d be a fine charger if I could find some of those li-ions that can safely be charged to 4.3v.
Pointer welcome if anyone knows where to find them.

I’ve outsourced my memory to Google, so I looked.

www.lygte-info.dk/info/Measurement%20UK.htmlCharge voltage: How to measure charge voltage in a charger.

So-o-o-o … I’d guess this company, whoever they are, have come up with a new way to overstate the light output from the flashlights — ship them with an overcharger.
If they’d also bundled an appropriate battery it would be all good. If anyone makes a 4.3v cell in this size.

By the way, I tried putting the charged cell into my VC4 — it reads zero, won’t allow anything to be done with it.
Also tried the discharge function from slot 1 of my XP4c, but it tries to keep charging it rather than discharge it, with the cell charged to 4.27v.
Hmmm.

Out of bounds bug in the firmware?

Okay, after resting overnight, the OTR i3
— goes into strobe with only two taps on the switch (yesterday it needed three, hmmmm)
— wasn’t noticeably difficult to zoom. I’ll have to remember to try it after we get a low pressure cell through in a few months (sigh, California summer)

VC4 cant detect calls over 4.2v
I really wanted this little zoomie to be good but so far it seems underwhelming.

It deserves being modified.

Yeah i still kind of want one if we ever get a group buy/coupon/flash sale. Even a simple pack minus battery and charger for less money would work.

Especially when you can buy something as good for $3… nobody minds paying more for a superior product but this just isn’t.

I do not agree, the i3 has a many features that make it stand out against any of the sub-$10 zoomies around:

-it is really small, the smallest and shortest zoomie I know
-the lens is glass and of decent quality. I carry the i3 in my pocket with penknife and keys: no scratches
-apart from the good old (but bulky) sk68, all small zoomies I’ve seen have a too narrow flood, in contrast the i3 is optically well designed: nice wide flood and a spot just over the sharp focus of the die, which gives the nicest spot beam.
-the switch looks very reliable and is servicable. I had several sk68’s fail from a faulty switch, and it is press-fit and very difficult to replace.
-the UI is a few levels better than the standard high, almost high, strobe with awful PWM that the cheapies come with
-from a modders perspective: brass solderable pill, 15 and 16mm driver ready, switch board replacable with standard switchboard with small Omten.

My i3 is modded with a standard Omten switch board, BLF-A6-driver and a 90CRI XP-G3 on a Noctigon, it makes a very smooth 700 lumen flood and throws 15kcd in spot. It was a fairly easy straightforward modding job in the i3, while in any cheap zoomie it would have been a h#ll of a fight with only so-so result.

+1 with djozz on all points, plus the SS bezel is gorgeous, 4 modes w/memory, zoom slide which you don't even notice it's there. The best small zoomie on the market. Though I like the new U-F10, this i3 is a keeper for it's smaller compact size and better quality optics.

The charger may have it's faults, but I didn't buy this light for the charger.

djozz,
Part of this is obviously personally preference as I’d rather better throw than flood and hence why I but a zoomie … the biggest thing is though I needed a certain level of output and wanted an “acceptable” run time and was going to use it on the mid setting which should give 1.5 hrs but instead to achieve 200+ lms I have to use it on high which will only give 30 odd mins run time and for me anyway is pretty much useless.

If the output wasn’t miss quoted I wouldn’t have wasted my money!!!