Positive Comments about Neal Zhang owner of Neals Gadgets

I’ve also had nothing but fantastic service and backup from Neal and Nealsgadgets over my four seperate flashlight purchases that he’s been involved with! He is an assent to the BLF community and an extremely fair businessman! He’s always willing to help and communicates on various platforms to try make it easier on the customer.
:smiley: Thanks Neal!

I have no complaints at all about Neal. Nothign but great customer service so far.

I have requested orders be cancelled and they have been promptly cancelled. He has upgraded shipping speed due to COVID and swallowed the extra cost. I’ve had 10 lights come in the last 2 months and all have been well packed and all items accounted for from the order. Any delays to the order have been due to local couriers dragging their feet.

I’ve even requested a change of LED and he has cancelled my order and allowed me to re-order with the correct item configuration.

The only thing to be aware of is that you can’t assume everything is in stock. It is most likely but they seem to group orders or something like that, so they don’t get shipped out within the day or anything like that (unless you are lucky, as I have been with the FW21 Pro).

Given the hassle of having to return to Neal for warranty, I don’t buy all my lights from him. I pick and choose based on a comparison to the local price and the expected build quality based on reviews.

Just an update to this -

After doing more research and tracking, the package has been in Los Angeles for almost a month (May 19th until today, June 18th). So this has got to be something with the USPS or third party delivery system. Absolutely no reflection of Neal or his business, I was just looking for some help. I understand this is not the correct forum, just figured i’d update anyone who may be wondering.

I’ve placed 3 orders with Neal, Never had an issue. On the first order, tracking didn’t get updated so I emailed Neal. He took a little longer than I preferred to respond. But I got tracking well before the item was even out of China, so I wasn’t too miffed.

I feel like if you go into an order with Neal expecting a long wait (standard business for ordering from china) for the item, and slow updates/correspondence (note that he was not slow to ship the item, just update/send tracking), then you will get your item just fine.

I admittedly have not had to handle any returns or defects.

how fast does he ship out orders now?

Am I the only one that’s spotted the Lumintop X9L for sale at Neals Gadgets?

No, I got the email from him with the discount code.

Neals shipping is really fast at the moment. Last two orders took about a week to arrive.

Thanks for this news TheAuditor especially since I went ahead and ordered one.

Very pleased to see the X9L alongside the Noctigon small form factor throwers, since I prefer the aesthetics of the FW series by far.

This may be a bit off-topic since it’s about a light instead of about Neal, but I don’t think the specs listed for the X9L are, um… honest. It’s spec’d at 6500 lm, but bare-LED bench tests maxed out at about 5300, so real OTF output is probably 4500 lm or less at start with a freshly-charged good cell and clean contacts, and would drop pretty quickly due to voltage sag and heat. The spec’d throw is ~163.8 kcd, but based on the reflector size and some measurements of other SBT90.2 lights, it should be 105 kcd or less.

For throwers, it’s odd to have such a large LED because it makes the light less throwy. If my math is right, the beam of the X9L should look almost the same as the FW1A (about ~23 cd/lm), despite the light being much bigger… because the LED is also much bigger.

First time Nealer here, shipped promptly, light came in at 2weeks to the US.

hm weird, i bought a fw21 pro and chose standard shipping and it seems now its being sent with DHL ? strange since he asks 25$ to be sent with such shipping… usally it was Postnl before corona if u picked standard….

Neals Gadgets is one of my favorite shops ! Good communication ! :+1:

I appreciate this input, foresight and well… honesty. I want to buy this light bc I thought even if the numbers were over rated by 10-15% I’d still be happy. But the estimations you are predicting show something completely different, and I have no reason to think you aren’t at least close if not very close. I’ll just wait until some peaople
Post some measurements on here at least. Thanks TK.

Just today received my Lumintop X9L from Neal’s Gadgets. Very quick delivery to the UK. I was expecting it to take many days more.

Super happy with the light. Quality is very good. Zero dust specks on the reflector which seems to be something that not all manufacturers can accomplish. It seems to handle the heat well. My new favourite mini powerhouse light!

Thanks to Neal for speedy delivery of this light.

Here’s a positive comment. I just got the prototype for the GT4 in the mail!!!

All my purchases from Neal have gone well . :+1:

I hope you’re able to mod it with 4 x SST90.2 at some point. :smiling_imp:

Bought a bunch of lights from Neal - very happy for the most part.

For the X9L, yes, of course the lumens are over stated. I got ~5,000 lumens out of a modded NI40 SBT-90.2, but with a 53 mm diam head, got 245 kcd measured, but it's rated at 220 kcd. The NI40 is rated at 5000 lumens, so actual results measured (manufacturer's lumens, not Maukka) were very close with the NI40.

For the X9L, 164 kcd may be a bit over stated, but for a 40 mm head diam, not off by all that much. 105 kcd sounds too low for me.

40 mm --> 53 mm

164 kcd --> 245 kcd

or

105 kcd --> 245 kcd

I dunno, didn't do the math - not sure how to do it.

I’m not sure what the correct method is, but I can at least described what I did.

I estimated the area of each reflector as the area of the outer diameter minus the area of the inner diameter… so if a reflector is 50mm across, but has a 20mm cutout at the center for the LED, that would be circle_area(50) - circle_area(20)… or about 1963 mm^2 - 314 mm^2 = 1649 mm^2.

# diameter of a circle to its area
circle_area = lambda x: math.pi * ((x/2.0)**2)

I don’t recall what exact measurements I used, but it was based on photos of each reflector and pixel measurements. The light I compared it to is a Noctigon K1-SBT90.

So, just napkin math… but I subtracted the inner hole. And the hole was pretty wide due to the large LED being used, so it hurts the smaller reflector more than it might initially seem. In the example above, increasing the diameter from 50mm to 67.8mm is enough to double the reflector’s area.