I had to go and get the dog a new eating bowl. The city is gridlocked, but I'll do some testing once I've eaten - it has taken me more than 2 hours to get back from the dog dish shop about 3 miles away.
Problem is the rural hinterland shoppers who infest the city at this time of year. They tend to drive extremely slowly in the middle of whatever road they are holding up and tend to be erxtremely aggressive drivers as well.
Add to this a blizzard and the rush-hour and the conditions get really bad.
And my assistant threw up all over the back seat of my mother's new car. The new dropin will certainly get some testing while I clean the seat.
Couldn't face cleaning the seat just yet. I'd made a mistake with the throw numbers - it was on medium, not high. The throw number I'm still finding hard to believe.
Lightbox
Light
Battery
Immediate
KD XM-L Dropin High in L2m flat bezel
18650
3160
KD XM-L Dropin Mediumin L2m flat bezel
18650
1250
KD XM-L Dropin Low in L2m flat bezel
18650
125
Same meter, same conditions as the MC-E. I'd better go and see to the car seat before I play any more..
Not bad spacing though medium might be better a little lower.
The head does get warm - there is a lot of aluminium foil stuffed in with it to make it a tight fit.
But the lumen maintenance over two minutes is extremely impressive - this may be the best maintenance of light on max of anything I have. The reflector seems a bit different from the usual P60 one. I'll do some pictures to explain, I've failed to put it into words.
The LED is not perfectly centred in the reflector as you can see from the picture above.
There are certainly more XM-L lights in my future - I never bought a huge number of XP-G lights - but I can see me replacing most XR-E ones with XM-L's or modding the XR-E lights.
If it'll stop snowing for a while I'll try for some beamshots, I've dug out an M bin MC-E, my brightest P7, an R5 and the XM-L. All have fresh from the charger 18650s in them.
Since the test range is a lot more reflective than usual, I'm going to drop the exposure a lot so the next shots will not be comparable to the usual ones.
You have to take off about 30% from LED figures to what a light puts out the front. This is why I almost always use the L2m body and flat bezel ring so at lest the losses are consistent.
The XM-L does need a lot of current from what I've read - at lower currents an XP-G can beat it from one test I read somewhere.
It isn't close to the claimed output but which one ever was?
The LED certainly isn't getting 3A, probably in the 2200-2500mA range. It might actually be brighter than the MC-E - it certainly is after a minute - remember the errors in these tests could be quite large.
I did never buy a MC-E or P7 and it looks like I don't need one in future. I ordered The XM-L C8 from KD and I hope that one will even perform better than these drop-ins.
It should do - dedicated lights have much more mass for heatsinking than P60 lights. That said, what really impresses me is the very low drop in output over two minutes compared to other high current dropins.
Thanks for the pics. I went and ordered a skyray type XM-L light. It costs 5usd more with the body then the dropin alone. I can't help myself but i like p60 hosts the most. Will probably change the driver to around 1,5A or more depending on what the original body or any other i have can do regarding heat.
KD says backordered.... yuck! probably around january 15 then...