I can see it now. You’re exploring a cave and decide to turn off the flashlight for a moment to appreciate the total darkness. When you try to turn it back on, Windows catches you with the ol’ “Please wait, installing update 1 of 24…”
Sapphire glass is a synthetically produced crystal second only to diamond in its hardness, making it extremely durable. It is typically grown in cylindrical sticks called boules, and is slow, expensive and energy-intensive to produce.
Windows? That is just asking for trouble. Your flashlight will just crash without reason. You will have to call Geek Squad to remove spyware and malware from your flashlight. Or you will get an email telling you to send bitcoins to someone that is holding your flashlight software hostage. Some 12 year old kid halfway around the world will be turning on your flashlight remotely in the middle of the night.
The original XP-L doesn’t quite fit into Carclo triple optics, because the dome is slightly too big. It’s a really close fit though, so the optic can be expanded a little to fit.
This is completely irrelevant for XP-L HI and LH351D though.
… and a few more pictures to show the size, color, and box:
Sizes and colors… The lights shown are, from left to right:
Okluma DC2
Reylight Pineapple (1xAA)
SK-68 clone (1xAA)
FW3A proto4
FW3A proto2
CNQG Brass Beauty (original), my smallest 1x18650 light by volume
Reylight Dawn
XinTD C8 V4 (bottom)
I’m also hoping there will be a diffuser cone made for it, because I like those and they work well with candle mode. I’m using a Fenix AOD-S now, but it’s not ideal. Here are a few of my lights with their party hats on:
Ideally, I’d like the FW3A diffuser to be nearly identical to the Olight S-Mini diffuser, except scaled up to fit.
One other nice thing about the FW3A is that it doesn’t cover any of the optic. Most Carclo triples obscure the outer edge of the optic, but the FW3A lets all the light through un-hindered:
… and just to keep all the pics in the same post, here’s that shiny button animation again:
I think I just drooled on myself a little. It looks so nice! Thanks for keeping us updated. I really appreciate it.
In the OP it says “current status: anodization is dark gray”… now, I can’t speak for others of course, but to me dark gray would be something like graphite (or maybe a bit lighter than that) - in the pics it looks like it’s closer to silver, kinda like a middle gray actually lol.
Did you swap in clear optics btw? Or did yours not come with a frosted medium spot?