REVIEW: UKing ZQ – X900 600Lm Zooming Flashlight (#3 type Zoomie) picture heavy!

Thanks for the review!

You may be right, it seems the lens is in fact made of plastic, I was fooled by the weight first. I have corrected this in the review.
K.

Thanks! Nice to have a review again on a real cheapie!! The led looks XP-E to me, if it was not for the 3rd bondwire absence I would have no doubts, especially since the tint is pretty good.

I’ll add some of my own measurements for this light (which I received for winning a contest). Tested with an Eneloop cell:

Output (approx): 55 lumens (zoomed out), 30 lumens (zoomed in)
Color temperature: 6700K
Run time: about 2 hours (tailcap current is 950mA, and gradually drops as the cell depletes)
Weight: 30g (1.05 oz)

Overall, I think it’s a very good buy for $2.85, if you can put up with the bluish cool-white tint. I was impressed with the feel of the clicky and the zooming mechanism. On the downside, the pocket-clip is really bad, so it’s best to just remove it.

Cross-reference, this is basically the generic light called the “#3 zoomie” in the compilation
thread title:
Under $10, 1x AA/ AAA/ 10440/ 14500 flashlight reference

They’ve swapped the slider piece with the grid texture and the one with the parallel groove texture.

Several more versions discussed at: Rustu XL-03 mini zoom Sipik 68 replacement - review and mod

Couple of notes:
— There’s probably a pill in it, if you take a tiny drill and put holes in the aluminum ring around the white plastic press-in thing that covers the LED wire solder points.
Then turn that and it will probably unscrew (or if they made it press fit, they’ve found a way to make these even cheaper)
Either way, you’ve got to be able to get the LED and driver out to improve this thing, the same way they got them into the body of the light. Find that and reverse it.

— When you lift up the white plastic press-in thing, then lift up the LED board and you’ll see what’s under it, if anything. If by any chance they’ve got a solid plane there with some thermal goop, that would be, well, astonishingly good. Odds are you’ll find a big hole and be able to see the driver, behind there.

— As with all versions of the #3 zoomie, you take the slidey part off (you do this by first removing the “pill”) then carefully file off the not-the-lens end a bit, that will let it slide a bit closer into the body and move the lens that much closer to the emitter — giving you a much wider floodlight without losing anything on the spot zoom side.

Yeah… very easy light to make much better and nothing to lose .
cut down the bottom part of the slider with a file and do a gas de-dome. those two simple things make the light much more better .
or a nicer tint xpg –2nw or a nichia doesn’t hurt them either. mine are all the older solid pill 3 modes. Since I don;t like the sk68 and don’t have a superlight it’s my 2$ AA light of choice .

Great review, those lights are better than nothing, especially when fully zoomed out. You can probably keep one in the car and other places because of the moderate price.

I have just received one and I can say that the tint definitely is NW.
Best cheap light for general use as home, basement, garage, car, etc.

By the way, you can make the light into a 3xAA using parts from the “3W POLICE” cheap 2AA light you can find somewhere for $2 or so.
Not all the threads will match, it’s just luck what you get.
http://budgetlightforum.com/search?q_as=%233%20zoom%203W%20police%20lego

Same gamble — one of the #3 zoomies I got had a solid pill; all the others have a ragged pill with a big hole and very poor contact between that and the LED board.
Pressing a copper disk into the hole can improve heat transfer. I did that on quite a few when replacing the emitter with amber LEDs.

Also, as mentioned earlier, you can file or saw off a millimeter or two of the slidey part on the tail side so the lens moves closer to the LED, making the beam wider.

And you can replace the switch, or swap in a SK68 tailcap.

’All in all, this light and the SK68 could be the mascots for BLF modding —> you can replace almost every part of them and the result will be a better flashlight.

“This was my grandfather’s axe. My dad put on a better head, and I replaced a cracked handle. But it’s still my grandfather’s axe.”

Thanks for idea hank.
I found at home Police 3 AA and made my 4 x AA lego zoom flashlight.
Unfortunately tube did not fit to UKing ZQ, but fitted to other zoom light.
Here it is:

It is lightning as hell and thanks god it is still alive. Battery are Ni-Mh.
This days I will go to our china stores to find 2 x AA tube.

Nice!

That’s surprising. Mine is definitely cool white. I measure the CCT as 6700K.

I have yet to find a really cheap light that has a neutral emitter. All the ones I’ve bought are cool, often bluish.

How do you do that measurement?

——-oogle—-oogle—-oogle——

Well, of course: http://nofilmschool.com/2015/04/your-iphone-now-professional-light-color-meter-cine-meter-ii-update

I just use a white-balance calibrator on my dSLR. If gives CCT, and green/magenta tint shift. I don’t claim it’s anywhere near as accurate as a professional measurement device, but it’s accurate enough for comparison purposes. It probably doesn’t work too well with “odd” spectrum lighting, like some florescent, or colored lighting. But for regular white lights, it gives a good ballpark number.

Yes, a phone-app probably does something very similar, assuming the device’s camera is good.

Interesting! I’ve been using a kit spectrometer for a while:

Yeah, that should give good results. Have you tested this light?

No, I don’t have one of these lights.
I of course cheerfully accept offers to review samples (grin).

And I recommend the $40 spectrometer kit, which PublicLab continues to improve. It’s fascinating to see how these fluorescent light sources work (and LEDs are fluorescents). You can see the blue emission spike in all the “warm white” lights, plus the added phosphor colors.

I think you can see all the spectra I’ve taken at: SpectralWorkbench

They show the blue emission that drives most LEDs, as well as the phosphor colors.

There are also some compact fluorescents shown there (CFLs)

PublicLab has you calibrate your spectrometers using CFLs, which have easily identifiable spectra.

Interesting. Is there software to convert the spectra into a graph?

Register and ask on their forums about the PublicLab tools — they’re rapidly evolving.

Have you tried it with a UV light? I’m curious to know if it will pick up the violet or even UV part of the spectrum. I’ve tried things like that (including a rainbow prism) with my camera, and it shows violet as blue. I presume because it only has RGB sensors, it has no way to show wavelengths shorter than blue, as anything other than blue.