Not to brownnose, but I gotta confess that I’m a newcomer to Convoy goodies, and am suitably impressed.
I’ve gotten generic Whateverfire clones (real and fake) just to use as cheap hosts, including my share of C8s. Some were actually pretty good, others a true race-to-the-bottom as far as cheap and shoddy. Finally got a Convoy host (type 2) from FT, and man, it’s like night and day.
By the time you replace the dinky featherweight Al pill, scratchy tailswitch, plastic(!!) reflector, etc., it’s just cheaper and less aggravating to get the genuine article.
I just have issues with the UI (most lights, not just the C8), else out-of-the-box would do me fine. But with the type 2, if I don’t have to actually solder/desolder anything, tweaking might be easy.
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My personal druthers? For a true flexible EDC (’502, S2, etc.), I’d want F/L/M/H (roughly fractional-lumen/5%/10%/50), quick doubleclick to 100 from anywhere (“hidden turbo”; another doubleclick to revert). Say 5 fastclicks to toggle mem/nomem. For a nice throwy pencilbeam C8, 30%/100% with memory would suffice. Same 30%/100% with mem for a zoomie or mule.
I love the C8, don’t get me wrong, but for me it’s not an EDC kind of light. It’s my “What in Hell’s making noise in that tree?!?” light. One of my faves is a ~4500K XP-E2 driven pretty lightly at 1A (3x7135). The XM-L2 and even XP-L can belt out more lumens, but not as tightly as a smaller-chip XP-E2.
Got some XP-L HIs on order, that’s my next project.