Single 18650, adjustable colour temp, ramping brightness, red LED setting.
Does anyone have one of these yet? Seems to be the sort of thing that would generate some hype here. Only ‘review’ I can find is a slightly shilly Reddit post.
I ordered a zanflare lantern a week or so ago. Gearbest had them on sale for 17 bucks. Was supposed to have shipped USA priority air with tracking, but par for gearbest, they took my money I paid extra for priority, shipped it via some obscure shipping company with no tracking. Who knows when it will arrive. Last time they did that to me, it took 8 weeks.
I ordered a Zanflare lantern 9 days ago. Fast forward to today: this morning I received an update that my order was “shipped out”.
So I guess in another 4 weeks a package will arrive at my home.
Hopefully the package won’t be hold in customs because of the 18650 that is shipped with it.
Got the lantern in. I have to say this a really cool lantern. About the size of the Fenix CL25R, and made out of similar hard plastic. Not cheap plastic at all. Comes with a 2600mAh unprotected flat top. Does this mean the lantern has LVP?, Don’t know. I tried a protected NCR-GA in it, and it’s too tight lengthwise. The cell it comes with, may be some junk cell, don’t know yet. I just re-wrapped it and charging it now.
Has 3 modes of operation, plus a red light 4th which is operated by a push button on the bottom.
The silver button at the top is a touch sensor.
Fairly nice machined battery tube. Cap has a magnet. Button is for the red light function, and the micro USB port.
The modes is where it gets ingenious. Will try my best to explain how it works.
One tap of the sensor turns the light on. Hold the button for up and down ramping brightness, just like the Q8 works.
There are 3 modes.
is cool blue light mode with brightness ramping
is a selected color temp mode that ramps up and down
is the color temp mode that ramps from cool blue to 2500k incandescent. (You select this color temp for use in mode 2)
The 4th mode is the red light button at the button, which also shuts the light off. 1 press, turns red on, one more press is flashing red, one more is light off.
So basically you start off by double tapping the sensor. This gets you into color temp mode. You ramp it to the desired temp, then tap the sensor and it puts you into mode 2 where your selected temp brightness can now be ramped up and down.
Clear as mud, right?
Personally, they should have skipped the cool blue mode altogether, since you can select cool blue if you wanted to.
It remembers the temp you select until you remove the battery, then it clears everything and you start over. But with usb charging, you shouldn’t have to remove the battery.
RobertB thanks for sharing your first impression. Most important point for improvement seems to be the UI so far; and starting in warm white as default instead of cold white.
Good to see some serious new competition in the domain of lanterns, especially the combination of good build quality, small size, low-weight, warm white LED, 18650 cell, lack of PWM.