[Review] 77 Outdoors D25 Headlamp (18650)

spend a day watching you tube videos about 123d design, and seems like got enough skills to make a simplest design, so i made similar holder for zebralight 600 series. first one came a bit crooked, the base was not 100% parallel to the printer bed. but otherwise the holder works, holds the light pretty firm, so today i made another design, hopefully better, will try to print tonight, this one is for zebralight as well.
anyone wants stl, pm i’ll email it, i can’t upload it to imgur. now that i know how, (it was not that hard turns out) i’ll replace all my silicone holders on all headlamps.

Nicely done, sir

Looks like gchart et al. is making this a blf favorite headlamp. I’m thinking of getting another one to mod with combo spot and flood optics. Anybody with ideas how to improve waterproofing on this one without sealing the top cover?

Hey @YuvalS. Have you managed to get your modified caving A6 driver to control 2 leds leds separately to work on this thing? I think this may be a perfect headlamp to test that.

I have noticed a few seemingly identical versions of this headlamp, ranging from as little as $10.76 USD on AliExpress, to a whopping $92.99 CND at Lynx OGT.

Other than the battery and headband, is there any difference from all of these versions to justify such a significant price range?

Only difference I’m aware of is the Sofirn D25S where they changed emitters and UI (I think those were the changes, I haven’t owned one).

Damn that Lynx version is expensive. Looks like they have the other generic boruit models too at 10x the price. A few are even sold out!!. Even if they put zebralight level driver, leds from the best bins and improve waterproofing don’t think the price is justified for this host. At $10 though, it’s one of the best bang for buck headlamps out there.

I doubt the driver is any different from one model to the other. Even the green button is the same across all price variations!

Sorry to ask this question again…. but I plan on getting one. Has anyone officially determined if these XM-L2 LED’s are not a real cree? I played with a wowtac a2s then a sofirn sp40 and I was thinking of getting one of those for myself. I then ran into the D25 and thought it would be within 1-2% difference between them, since they all have XM-L2’s. I would actually expect the D25 is better because it has 2 XM-L2’s? I’m not sure I understand.

1. I don’t know if the LED is genuine, considering low price I suspect it’s not.
2. Regardless if that’s the case, performance is not within 1-2%. Let’s assume for a while that the LED is genuine XM-L2…

  • For the same CCT and CRI, the difference between top bin and bottom bin is ~25%
  • Within bin there’s about 7% difference
  • Any CCT differences add variability
  • Driver and optics are not the same, driver has huge effect on performance while optics has quite minor but still way more than 2%
  • D25 has unregulated driver while the other 2 are regulated. This means that D25 output drops as battery deplates which is not the case with the other 2. It may be better at full cell but worse at near-empty

EDIT:
Scratched info that the 2 lights that you’ve seen have regulated drivers as I’ve got notice from RD that this is incorrect w.r.t Sofirn SP40

I see people assume this a lot. Cree lists +–7% which is a potential 14% difference within a single bin. I guess they try to stay within 7, but allow 3.5 extra on each end just to cover themselves.

The bottom line is it’s probably about 7% like you said. Just thought I’d mention it.

I was talking about different 7% and missed this one. :wink:
You’re talking about “Cree maintains a tolerance of ±7% on flux and power measurements”.
I was talking about bin width, f.e. T5 is 260-280 lm (7.7% width) and U3 is 320-340 lm (6.3% width).

So…there’s even more variability than I listed above.

They has XP-Footprint and I think they are no genuine Cree LEDs.
They looks similar to XP-L LEDs.

i’m pretty sure those are LB leds, not cree

The Sofirn SP40 driver is also unregulated. Brightness decreases as the battery runs out.

Strange. It must vary from source to source. Mine had the 5050 (XM-L2) footprint:

Thanks for the correction.

Yes, that is correct… the SP40 is unregulated

I got my first D25 from 77Outdoor on Amazon and they clearly stated in their ad at that time the emitter was Cree-like and confirmed in an email that they were not Cree. Since that time their D25 model has been updated to SST-40 (similar to the Sofirn D25S offering.)

However the D10/D25/D20 based headlamps are apparently offered by many different vendor house brands and the emitters used by each may vary.

There seems to be more consistency with the Sofirn and/or Wowtac headlamps but that’s my assumption.

You are right, I checkt my lights.
The older one, with the driver-pics in this thread has XP-LEDs. This is from Xanes, ordered from Banggood.
The newer from Aliexpress has XM-L2 - Style LEDs, with “LMP” written on the LED.





Yeah, thanks for the info. It really seams that (I guess even for a fake XM-L2?) this D25 headlamp keeps up with the sofirn pretty decent for the first 2 hours (judging by the run time/output graphs)? Am I right? Does having 2 of the LED’s over just the version with 1 actually make it brighter? I was thinking about getting the single LED with the zoom feature, but I want more brightness over zoom.

Never heard of LB.

Really great information from everyone.

I assume that these are still pretty great to have for the price and come close to wow and sofirn, so I have 3 choices; Sanyi D10, Boruit D10 & Sanyi D25

What do you guys thinK :question: