Fit and Finish
Fit and finish is pretty decent at first glance. The ano is nothing to write home about, but it is as good or better than the average budget light. Threads are pretty loose, so they go on and off easy with no grit. The light gained points in my book because the brand name is the only thing etched on the side: no ridiculous lumen claims or anything like that. It is heavier than you might expect. Without a battery it is pretty top heavy because the sliding mechanism causes a lot of overlap. Fully “zoomed” adds 30mm to the length. O-rings are fairly plentiful, although the waterproofness of the light is dubious. The main reason for this is the tripod adapter. The entire nut unscrews and opens a hole to the inside of the light. Also, the pill has lots of cut-outs that go all the way through to the battery tube (one of the pictures is a shot looking down the battery tube; you can see light coming through the pill “vents”). Emitters appear to be genuine Cree XP-E’s. The lens is plastic and did not have any visible imperfections, though I am not really qualified to comment on lens quality. It does a seemingly great job of focusing the emitters, the die projection is quite tiny. The light comes with a 3S AA holder which is made out of plastic but actually feels pretty solid.
Operation
Simple. There are 6 modes: High and Low for each color led. Half-press the reverse-clicky to change modes. The colors are a deep blue, a cool white, and “amber” which is actually a slightly warm white color, not as orange as I think of amber being. There is no memory, it always starts on high white, then low white, then high “amber” and so on. The high white pulls ~1amp and the other two pull ~0.7amp. The zoom is operated by sliding, and it is too loose. If you tail stand the light fully zoomed-out it will slide half way back down without any bumping or vibration needed. On flood mode you can’t tell the led’s are so off center. In zoom you can tell they aren’t centered but the light doesn’t come out at weird angles and the emitter dies are still focused (although my camera couldn’t pick it up). There are a ton of artifacts in the zoom mode though.
Video of all modes
Mod Forecast: ?
I still haven’t been able to get the pill out. I stick some narrow pliers in the cut outs and tried twisting both directions to no avail. I looked down in those openings and can’t see any threads. I’m worried the whole pill may be press-fit into the head. The lens may give this light a future life if I can get the pill out. I will keep messing with it to see what I can find out.
Conclusion
Pros: Overall quality control is good, convenient size in my opinion, comes with good AA carrier, clean logos/markings, could have mod potential depending on pill
Cons: questionable design, less-than-stellar water resistance, unknown purpose
Final word: I really don’t understand the point of it. I think Sharp Eagle would’ve been better off using this host to make a single-led light. It’s interesting, but the novelty wears off fast.
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This light was provided by GearBest for review. You can purchase it from them here,
Nice review, surprised you put the effort in on it. When I got mine, I played with it one night, then immediately left it as a gift/work toy…its pretty hard to see a use for it except a toy, maybe 4th of July waving a blue beam around in the sky?
I didn’t even bother measuring to see if a 32650 would fit, did you? Not sure why you’d really want to make this one run forever though, if all could be turned on at once maybe it would be useful focused out as a tent light, but the amount of light from a single emitter on focused wide is not anywhere near impressive.
Nice benefit — the 3xAA carrier it comes with, solid, put together with screws.
I asked both at Gearbest’s product page and at their thread here if someone knows how to contact the Sharp Eagle manufacturer, to ask for help taking the thing apart.
Not likely, but figured making the point that modders would like this if it could be disassembled.
Thanks for the review
I bought this light mainly because the specs claim glass lens with anti reflective coating, I guess this is more of gearbest fraud that they will give the usual apology for :Sp
You have to remember, most of this stuff is drop-shipped, the people answering under the “Gearbest” umbrella don’t really know what they’re selling, most of the time, and can’t find out.
Heck, the people assembling the items probably don’t know what the parts are made of or where they come from, on any given day.
As far as I can tell this is the same host as the Warsun, just with 3 emitters instead of one. Even with a domed XP-E at only one amp, the thing really throws.
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Anyways, Gearbest wanted me to share a coupon for this light.
The specs on glass/reflector are very frequently wrong on budget lights. I definitely wouldn’t buy a budget light based heavily on those specs being accurate.
Thing throws real good stock, got it real cheap.
I can use the sturdy 3-AA adapter in other lights too, so a great deal.
The blue is a nice color as well.
I wonder if just sliding a hollow dowel or piece of PVC pipe or something down through the battery tube could push the whole driver/emitter out the front end.
Do I wonder it enough to buy another one of these and try it? Oh, I don’t … think …… so ……
Got mine today, and just so happen to the get the Warsun X65 today as well, and true what's been said - these are identical in every way for the body, spacer, AA carrier, and lanyard. Just different LED's (and driver I suppose). Also, very, very hard to get the pill out. I'll try Kloepper's method to use some hammer taps from the driver side.
Also have to agree - for this money, it's not bad at all - nice spacer for a 26650, real nice triple AA carrier (relatively), and body/host is decent. I measured 1.18A on white high, and 0.80A for the 'yellow' and blue. It does about 200 lumens @start on white hi, close to that on blue, but blue measures high on our meters of course, but still the blue looks pretty intense for such low amps.
I had tried that about 5 times before it finally did work. Now that I have it out, I’m unimpressed by the pill. Very light and cheap feeling aluminum, and not very good thermal contact with the host.
I can’t decide if I should mod it and sell it cheap, or basically give it away as it is now.
The reflector is press fit, maybe glued in. I knocked it out from behind with a nail set tool and a couple of taps with the hammer. Before that though, I tried a needle nose in the middle to twist it out - that scratched it up pretty good:
The driver was another nasty affair. The pill lips are actually rolled over the edge of the driver, holding it in very tight. I scratched off a resistor using a SS pick tool to pry it out:
Fortunately, it s a resistor used in voltage reference circuit so should be easy to replace:
Here's a nice shot of the driver. This should be very familiar to many of us knowing Nanjg's and our BLF drivers. All the basics are there, like the cap, diode, voltage reference, and 4 outputs controlling 4 FET's, with apparently 2 current limiting resistors each. MCU is unmarked, but gotta wonder if it's an ATMEL part. Pin #1 if Vin, pins #2, #3, #5, #6 are for the FET's, pin #4 looks disconnected, pin #7 for the voltage reference, and pin #8 is ground.
Closer:
Here's the LED's:
Hers you can see the traces. Pretty simple really:
So to get the pill out, I tried a larger socket with extension (Snap-On no less from my dad's old toolbox, 30+ yrs old), tapped a couple of times, still didn't budge. Tapped it twice heavily now, using a light weight hammer though, than twisted pressure and it gave way and loosened. I use cheapo rubber coated gloves to get a better grip, and I used a pretty robust pair of needlenose, CCW to loosen it.
Yes - shiny sh.. is a sure sign that it's cheap aluminum. All depends what you want to do. I'm think'n I should upgrade the LED's to XP-L, RED XP-E2, and blue or green XP-E2. Than can fiddle with the resistors to boost accordingly, giving more to white. Unfortunately, probably stuck with the MCPCB, but not planning on going over 2.5A on white anyway. If I could do it, would be great to do the old trick of converting the MCPCB pads to DTP with copper pressed in, ala comfy. You could thermal epoxy it down to the pill top and should help.
A 1” to 3/4” bushing from the hardware store copper section is a good place to start if you decide to modify. It’s a bit too big for a press fit as is, but makes a nice lump of copper once you work it down to fit. Direct drive on the one I modified to a single XP-G2 S3 3C, 6 minutes in flood mode, and I could touch the pill with it still on and it wasn’t uncomfortable.
Something I haven’t done on mine is wrap the outside of the driver area of the pill with foil like people do with P60’s to improve heat transfer. I suspect this could be beneficial, but not necessary unless it’s running more than 5A on a 3V emitter with the modifications I made.
It’s too bad, I’d pay $25-$35 easy for the Warsun X65 with a good brass pill (of a different design than the current monstrosity) and switch retaining ring, and higher quality lens with a shorter focal length.
Oh fyi, on the pics above, accept the last one, I used a Nichia in a slim AA zoomie on moonlight mode to provide the light for the pics, using my dated Pana Lumix MC-ZS7.
