TK's Emisar D18 review -- 3x18650 photon grenade

Well, yeah, those arguments can be valid, might should be valid, but of course it will depend on what I do to get there. :wink: I may add a finned spacer and give it a couple of pounds of thermal mass to work with. Might even go copper. Might use those optics, might not. I may just machine a larger head to screw into the bezel threads and use 20mm 15º optics over all 18 LH351D emitters. :smiley: Or 24 emitters, or however it may work out. Who knows? I kinda tend to do these things on the fly, so even I don’t know where it’s going til it’s gone. :stuck_out_tongue:

Thank you AEDe.

Please explain. Even the newest version of the M43 (approx 8000 lumens) does not make even close to the same amount of lumens as the D18. I cannot find any definition of ansi lumens that would make the M43 outperform the D18.

Even for an 8000 lumen light the M43 is underwhelming, and after reading lots of similar posts I’m far from the only one that feels this way. It does a nice ceiling bounce, but is lacking in real world use. It’s just so floody that it doesn’t throw very far or light up any one thing very much…but it sure does light up a large area! Any of my lights with more lumens (and lots with less lumens but more of a hot spot) seem much brighter and can see a lot further than the M43.

I don’t foresee any measurement, theoretical or otherwise, that is actually going translate to the M43 outperforming the D18 in the real world. I would absolutely love to be shown otherwise. At the moment my M43 has been demoted to my nightstand with a diffuser, due to its nice moonlight mode for reading and long runtime on low. It deserves more, but like others have mentioned, its UI and size are not worth putting up with for me.

ANSI lumens are measured at 30s.

The ANSI lumen figures are certainly not very useful for comparing these two flashlights, both of which are not designed to operated at turbo for very long…. It’s really a silly technicality to point out… And it’s really a useless metric because you could design a flashlight that sustains a brightness level long enough to get a higher rating but immediately has to severely step down right after 30 seconds…

Also I don’t know much about how the thermal step down works but if you started on say 8k lumens on the d18 would it even get a lower ANSI lumen figure than the m43? Is that a stupid question?

It was a joke)
M43 and D18 have about the same mass. So if we start D18 at ~8-9Klm it could show more ANSI lm than D18 at turbo and Meteor at turbo.

Except there is no copper touching aluminum, it’s gold touching aluminum.

My old M43 had issue in that place. After washing it stopped to turn on(it shows power warnig indication) at turbo with fully charged new hidrain 18650. Than I had disassemble it and had seen oxidation between copper board and host. After cleaning it works fine.

The ground from the aluminum host is made by the screws securing the copper board, and these screw holes are gold plated. So there is no ground through an aluminum to copper contact. The copper is clad in masking and the contacts are, you guessed it, gold plated. :wink:

(brass ground screws can up the ante a bit on current draw, just saying)

Thanks for clarifying, but it does not change the essence. This place can have a fairly high resistance due to corrosion. At least in the first batches of M43 it was so. Now the quality of metal working of Henk’s flashlights greatly improved. Maybe something has changed.

Thanks for the response!

Does this need a high drain battery?

For the best performance, yes. I believe 30Qs or VTC6s are recommended. I went with VTC6s, my first set ever.

have published some pictures in the german forum:

None of my batteries fit... lol.. You really need a high positive nipple otherwise it doesnt make contact.. I'm not a fan of doing it this way! But I guess that is the only cheap solution to reverse polarity protection?

I will have one of these but it may take a while for me since my wife continuously gripes about me buying lights. May have to go a month without a purchase just so it doesn’t seem so bad to her. She doesn’t understand.

It is almost the only posible protection for parallel battery connection.

Ok.. Just sad that not even my "normal button top" batteries work.

I don’t have many unprotected button-top cells, so I did the same thing I usually do when I need something like that… solder-blob the top of flat-top cells.

Chibi, solder blob the pad so the button top will work. :wink: