TK's Emisar D4 review

Exactly what a few people were saying a couple of dozen pages ago…

I didn’t mean you’ll never need another light. Quite the opposite, different needs call for different lights. But having used this UI, I know I will not enjoy about any light available.
The bar has been raised. Other manufacturers need time to catch up. I surely hope they do it soon.

Agreed. I am looking forward to upcoming Emisar offerings. With even more improvements to the UI. WOW! Great time to be a flashaholic.

Nice solution!

I just put a chris reeve style lanyard on my 18350 tube for some extra grip.

How about two thick O-rings in the grooves; would that make sense?

Should work well also. For now I like the “pistol grip” with the lanyard.

Yeah I think it looks great, and I sure can imagine it works well too. Nice colour combination too. :+1:

The way I see it is not that you have a lux meter and a window and a doggie. The doggie is your cousin’s who lives 20 km away.
Anyway it may still be better than the average.
Though I mentioned it before, measuring directly would be another improvement.
However….I see in the simulator that you don’t model body temperature explicitly. I have not looked at D4 sources, so it may be different. Directly, this is the value that you measure during calibration. And this is the temperature that you’d like to limit; not LED temperature really. Is there some accuracy to be gained by adding another latency parameter?

I asked a while ago to clarify which XP-L HI bin did you use in the test. Could you clarify?

I used whatever bin(s) Hank sent. It has a cool tint, so probably the 1A option. However, both XP-L HI and XP-G2 test units were thrown together from spare parts which seemed unfit for customer use, so it’s possible the bins may not match any of the ones he sells.

The simulator is nowhere near an accurate physical model; it’s a quick approximation. It sounds like some other recent projects (BLF GT, maybe FW3A) used some sort of fancy CAD simulator for thermal modeling, but I don’t have anything like that. My entire development and testing setup is pretty ghetto — a DMM, a power supply, an “integrating milk carton”, and a few decapitated lights with their brains hanging out.

My pocket must be looser than yours. Been pocket-EDCing a D4 for 3 weeks now without any lockout activated and I’ve had zero accidental activations.

That said, just in case, I do make sure never to put it in my pocket with turbo mode memorized.

That’s what I do when I put it in my coat pocket as well. However because of this, the D4 falls in a specific category of EDC lights; one that does require attention.

Pretty cool indeed. Reminds me of Apple II playing some mono tonal Bach back then …through a one bit DAC - the speaker plugged right into the digital out i’m guessing. I had a bit of fun with machine code experimenting with polyphony on that crude audio interface. There is a whole culture of one bit sound audio in fact. You can even produce speech phonemes and synthetic voices.

That would make quite a fun Easter egg on a flashlight. Especially if you can upload or record different audio bits. :partying_face:

Every light that utilizes a Li-ion cell requires attention. Period.

I skimmed, but I admit I didn’t in detail read all 47 pages of this thread to find the answer to my question, so if it has been asked and answered already, I apologize. I’m wondering what is the practical purpose for having the UI set so the light “blink when passing the 100% 7135 level, for reference”. I can understand the blink at the lowest level of ramping, and blink at highest level, but I can’t see a reason why I would need to know when the ramping is passing the highest fully regulated level (FET turns on here) and blinks while it is passing through. While not a big deal, the lowest level blink and the highest level blinks seem helpful and important, the 100% 7135 level blink just seems annoying to me, and I can’t figure out a reason I need to know when the light is passing through that point.

This is not meant to be critical, I bet there is a reason the extra work was put into creating this reference point blink. Can anyone explain to me how it is useful to know this point in the ramping?

Other than that annoying (to me) lower level blink in the otherwise silky smooth ramping, this UI is one of my favorites of the over 300 lights that I own.

Thanks in advance for your help.

^ From what I remember it has to do with the fact that with ramping it’s difficult to know how many lumens you’re getting, unlike with fixed setting, for example 10 or 100 lumens. The double blink lets you know that you’re at around 140 lumens depending on which led you have. The practical reason for this output is that it is a nice usable output, and the technical “geeky” reason is that you have 100% 7135. So it’s an orientation.

It is simply to let you know when you are leaving the far more efficient 7135 powered portion and entering the inefficient fet levels. If you edc and need to use it a lot it is a excellent way to be sure to conserve your battery. At least that’s why I like it.

Thanks for your responses. Now I get it. I think ToyKeeper is absolutely brilliant and I felt she wouldn’t include this feature unless there was some practical purpose that I didn’t understand. Now I understand. Thanks again….

Does anyone know if there’s plans to make a similar light in a larger body with bigger reflector? Hopefully with added heat sinking people with delicate baby soft hands like me can use it without welding gloves on.

There is indeed a thrower with a bigger reflector coming up next, from what I recall. Someone with a better memory will probably give more info and the name.

It’s most likely going to be a lot different in function though. Nothing like a floody quad.