[Review] NOCTIGON K9.3 by Hank Wang

Four new lights actually. E12R, T9R, NOV-Mu and T1R. The latter one has not been seen in the wild(erness) yet but I asked Jacky to send me one for review. The 6A buckdriver is derived from Loneocean's Lume-1 driver and as far as I am informed Loneoceans made this custom driver for Fireflies. Not sure, if this information is of any help to sort the licensing issues, though.

https://www.ff-light.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=64

Not sold yet on this light. Seems overly complicated. Not saying I don’t like it.

D’oh?

If it doesn’t speak to you, don’t get one. It’s not something I would get, because it’s not a category of light I have a use for. I use wide “soup can” lights sometimes when I need many lumens for a long time, especially for photo lighting purposes or as a lantern. And I use “plunger” shape thrower lights sometimes when I need to see a long distance. But I don’t really see the appeal of a “plunger” shape flood light.

I would even use a soda can thrower (3×18650 is the best format I have ever used, but I would still use 3×21700, I guess). “Plunger” shaped floodlight is kind of ‘meh’ for me, too. Unless it is very special (still, not this one).

Well, I actually bought 3 of these and I love them. One of them is E21A 2000K on CH1 (my favorite indoor tint) with 660nm red secondaries. So awesome for use around the house.

I have another one that I carry when I’m out that has 4000K XP-L HI V2 5D + red secondary and it’s great to be able to activate the red for in the car, etc.

I understand why it couldn’t be/wasn’t done for the K9.3, but I’d still love to see a tint ramping light from Hank.

Oh yeah me too. Great idea

2000K/2200K + 6500K E21A tint ramping light would be an instant buy for me.

Hank does tint mixing… I have a D18 with an even mix of 2700 and 4000’s. Beautiful soft yellow beam like an old maglight

Mixes are one thing, I mean a light like the Sofirn IF25 or LT1 that can smoothly and gradually transition between each extreme. Having the top and bottom end of most white lighting - and everything in between! - from a single light is super appealing to me.

That’s wild… I didn’t even know there were single LEDs that can vary the tint of the light they emit. I figured it was done by having multiple LEDs of different tints and adjusting the intensity of each of them to get the different tints

I think the 4 LED's are wired on 2 different output channels, therefore the firmware can control the levels of each pair independently. So if you have a pair of WW tint and a pair of CW tint, by mixing percentages, you can have a resulting beam of NW and every tint between WW and CW.

I tried to get Hank to make a D4 or KR4 with tint ramping… but he didn’t like the idea.

The downsides are:

  • It would be even harder to wire together… and the D4v2 is already quite a pain to assemble.
  • Less total light output, especially at extreme CCTs.
  • Less-smooth beam, especially at the extreme CCTs.
  • Would need to design and manufacture a new MCPCB.
  • Would need to either reduce to one power channel per LED group, or design a new driver with 4 power channels instead of 2.

The upsides are:

  • Ramp from warm white to cool white or anything between.
  • Rosy tint on middle CCTs.
  • Hank could reduce the number of models he carries… instead of 4 tints for each of 3 LED types, he could carry a single model for each LED type.

It would be cool to have, but it’s also a lot of work to make it happen… and he’s pretty busy.

I have better idea

A 9.3 with 9 throwy and three floody optics would sell really well I presume.

Edit: Before anyone posts this Star Wars video - yes, yes, then this is not the light we’re looking for.

Oh yes, outside wide optics and inside narrow . Zoom with no moving parts hehe

Did you have a chance to show him this D4V2 mod?

https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/64468

I think something like this would sell very well, too. But even w/o UV light it would probably mean a lot of work as it requires serial connection to each single LED.

It’s cool, but no. That mod takes everything he was concerned about… and turns it up to eleven.

The latter is exactly what is done. By smoothly shifting the power up and down for both channels (each wired to the LED (s) of a single color temp) you can smoothly ramp through the whole range of color temp they provide, with the actual temps of those LEDs obviously being the min and max settings.