You misunderstand me. When I say it’s temperature based I mean the ambiant air temperature as well as the 55°C stock setting in the flashlight. So a cold windy day will allow it to run longer/brighter than in a hot room.
The problem with testing is you need someone with an integrating sphere to measure the lumens plus the time to sit there and do the tests. I don’t know if any has done this yet.
I think users have reported that Turbo will only last about 30 seconds with high drain batteries because it’s really bright and can put out a ton of heat. Hopefully someone can confirm or update this.
I like to know the highest sustainable lumens for the light in a 23°C/74°F room with no air flow. The Emisar D18 was tested at about 2,000 lumen continuous. The MF01S is a little bigger, but similar leds and driver. I’m guessing it will do 2000-2500 lumen with the SST-20 leds. Now using the light outside on a 74°F day where there is air circulation and your hand is also absorbing heat the max sustainable lumens will be higher, like 3,000 maybe. On a really cold windy day it might be higher still.
You can also set the temperature limit in the firmware higher or lower which will effect the max continuous lumens.
We won’t have any concrete numbers until someone tests it. Maybe someone without an integrating sphere can just use the default stepped ramp levels.
The bottom line is you can control the brightness with 150 steps (in ramping mode) so you can adjust the output to keep it from getting too hot.
Here are the thermal tests from the D18. Toykeeper tweaked the software for both lights so I would assume the MF01S has similar thermal regulation behavior. The lights are different size so the lumen outputs in the graph will be different. I predict a bit higher lumens due to the MF01S’s larger size and more heatsinks.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of what to expect.
No, I think I understand. It depends on the ambient temperature as well as the preset 55c at which it will dial down, and the power of the leds, and the geometry of the less/heat dissipation in the body. This is one of the deciding factors for me whether to buy or not whether a sizeable, rather powerful light ( 5-6k lumens) can actually sustain a high enough lumens for a while to be used For a high lumen source purposes, so that one can still hold it and it doesn’t overheat to the point of breaking down.
Always a balance between the size and the high lumen duration…
For me, it probably doesn’t make sense to buy a 6k lumen capable light and all the size/ cost/ liabilities that come with it that can only sustain 1-2k lumens in a stable reliable way.
Yes, flashlights are meant to be small and portable so they are quite limited as far as how much heat they can shed. There are small fan cooled lights (LED based) with high sustained output, but they are very expensive.
I think the current leader for highest sustained lumens for a non-active cooled led light is the Imalent DX80. It is rated at 32,000 lumen and can sustain 6k-7k lumen. It’s a very big light running efficient leds.
If you main goal is to get the max sustainable output you want to use very efficient LEDs like Cree xpl, xhp70.2, etc… The Luminus SST-20 is not very efficient.
A cheaper light source that can handle very high temps would be an HID design, but they also have their negative sides like cost and lower efficiency.
Keep in mind that sometimes we get fixed on a lumen number, like I need 4000 lumen continuous, when the actual number is flexible. 4000 lumen spread over a big area looks dim. 4000 focused in a small area looks bright. So we have to consider hot spot size as well as lumens.
Yes I am very conscious of the area the light distributes to. I in fact in general dislike flooders and like searchlight as much more versatile lights where I can get a definite hot spot to throw farther if need be as well as illluminate an immediate area almost evenly.
I do think there is a light better/ much cheaper than imalentdx80 that can sustain high output 8,000 lumens almost indefinitely, which is thrunite TN 36 limited edition. Turbo at 11k, and then dials down to 8k for a loooooooong time it seems….
That light seems to be about 3500 lumen continuous. Definitely not 8000. It’s just too small to shed enough heat. The 70.2 LEDs are pretty efficient, though.
I have the tn36, it’s definitely much brighter than 3500 once turbo dials down. I don’t know if it runs indefinitely but can do some more testing . To my bare eyes it looked tentatively around 8, as it was brighter than the fireflies E07 with 6900lm and sofirn q8. But again I didn’t wait thaaat long to see what happens…
Does anyone know many amps the three different aux modes pull or approximately how long long it takes to deplete the batteries on these modes? Will the blinking mode drain faster?
I tested the ten 36 last night. After the turbo dial down ( which didn’t work the right way for me I suspect due to the old batteries, it just turned off) I decided to see how long it will stay on max ramp ( 8k lumens) I did 2 tests with 2 sets of batteries which were a couple years old. The first test was half hour and the light output stayed somewhere in between 5-7 k lumens with almost no sagging at all. Most sustainable thing I’ve seen, the one hour same thing sagging maybe to around 4.5-5,5 . After the test the vbatteties were at around 3.53v. This was all visual in comparison with other lights and of course a warmer tint of the tn36 I had messed up my perception a bit too. But it was definitely about 3.5k for like an hour. For the first 20 minutes I could still hold the handle but after than needed a towel to tolerate the temperature. Hope this helps.
Don’t trust your bare eyes. I learned so much after I bought the TA lumen tube. The E07 is a flooder so the beam intensity is lower, which makes your eyes think it is less bright. For example, if I compare my Acebeam K75 that measured 4,100 lumens with my E07 that measures 6,500 lumens (both are CW), the K75 looks MUCH BRIGHTER to my eyes than the E07.
For anyone wanting to maximize their output, I gained about 1,000 lumens in both of my MF01S by doing a thorough cleaning. I took the battery carrier out, unscrewed the contact plates in both the tube and tail cap and gave everything a thorough clearning with detergent. I also wiped down the threads and contacts in the head with isopropyl alcohol.
This is a very good practice. I always wash my flashlights when I receive them from the factory. Most flashlights gain at least 10% from thorough cleaning like this one. Some of my flashlights see 20–30 increase in output after cleaning. It’s too easy to get thread grease on the contacts and batteries so you need to clean them occasionally. I also clean my batteries and contacts on my charger every once in a while.
Also if you must use thread grease, use a conductive grease like the NO-OX-ID.
Funny you mention cleaning. I just got my second MF01S and it had some kind of grit or gravel in the box when it arrived. I had to pop a couple small rocks out of the cooling fins and the light had some gritty powder that needed to be washed off. Thankfully no damage to the light, everything looks and functions just fine.
And an update about the faint noise coming from my purple 4000k light. The new green 6500k light does the exact same thing and both are working perfectly so I’m sure it’s completely normal.
