Recently I have contacted Asaffee flashlight manufacturer with a question:
” Does your HT flashlight uses acrylic/plastic lens? ”
They answered: “HT flashlight uses PC optical lens”.
Now I googled this up and found that PC lens should be Polycarbonate optical lens…
So mine question for you guys are this type of lenses plastic lenses?
Are PC optical lens same as Acrylic lens or in other words is PC nicer word for plastic? If they ain’t the same thing what are the differences between these two?
You opened my eyes.
They are both plastic materials.
So generally when we speak about PC (polycarbonate) vs Acrylic lens in flashlight usage the most important data we would need is light transmittance.
From video it is seen that PC is more shock/scratch resistant material than Acrylic. So it is probably softer and more flexible mix of materials than Acrylic. But real comparison test of same diameter/focal length would be desirable.
We have few zoomie flashlights with plastic lenses(I don’t know if anyone can tell weather they are PC or acrylic?) on a market and I can say from mine experience that they are real bingo in comparison to glass one (99% consistency, cleaner beam, better flood and throw, shock resistant), and the most important thing is that there is no fear in breaking one out so you have one serious flood to throw setup.
Glass IMHO should be ditched for serious zoom flashlight use… Glass is simply to fragile. It is not premium at all as some zoomie fans thinks.
I personally have score of around 100 glass aspheric fails out of 500 glass aspheric flashlights (since I sell lot of them). They tend to break under gun recoil, with over tightening the bezel, and of course drop on hard surface.
Some guys may have different opinion of course but plastic is simple unbeatable for regular usage while glass is good enough for candela record breaking and high quality one costs a fortune while regular China production glass sucks with poor consistency…
Some China manufacturers figured that out already and they are going into right direction while some don’t want to accept the truth making my/their life harder than it should be.
