In the city onto building it’s great, but on a farm it’s quite bad, that would be LEPs in general though.
I tried shinning it on the hill I’m standing on from that house and it was terrible, couldn’t see the hill. It was most certainly reaching, but due to the beam being so thin you just couldn’t identify any surroundings to know where abouts everything was. Even at 1,300m on a closer hill I couldn’t see anything. Tried again with 10x binoculars and still nothing. Pulled out the BLF GT90 and it’s lighting up everywhere with ease.
I’ll sell this once I’m done for the reduced reviewers price I purchased everything for.
Fun for in the city, but for me on the farm it’s not so much fun.
First Jetbeam, now Maxtoch…great. is this the new trend then? Releasing “upgraded” products which perform worse than their predecessors. I’ll wait for 1lumen review but this isn’t looking good.
If it does not let you see in the dark, it’s not a flashlight. It may be something else, but not a flashlight. The LEP is a direct contradiction of light in general. It really has more characteristics of a laser than a flashlight. I think the image presented makes that very clear.
Yesterday evening i was playing a bit with the L2K and WT90.
The L2K throws way farther, but the beam of the WT90 is fantastic! It might not reach 2,5km but the beam is a lot bigger and way more useful as it lights up a lot more with very limited spill
Absolutely, I would never buy an LEP, I just grabbed one for a review and getting a reviewer’s discount it was a great opportunity to try an LEP.
Immediately regretted it after seeing just how difficult it was to capture the beam on camera. Flashaholics channel on youtube only uses reflective buildings, but on a farm it’s so much more difficult.
Since there’s zero light pollution the camera can’t use auto focus, so I need to do everything manually.
I find building footage quite deceiving for the viewer as it’s an entirely different story with real world use
I find beam angles below 3° to be rapidly declining in usefulness, especially for distances <1/2 their max range. Even then, often times a light with less peak intensity but wider spot provides better visibility. I’ve never tried an LEP, but I do have 1mm² Osram aspheric and fresnel throwers that are quite useful for urban environments or areas with light/reflective objects in the foreground. My thinking on this LEP tech is that it’s best suited to short focal length optics <40mm Ø. Cd/lm is just too high otherwise. Maybe they’d be great through binoculars?
I wouldn’t. As far as I know, Vinh mods it with a linear driver which means the light will decrease in brightness as the battery drains which makes it much worse than stock.
Laser diodes have a Vf of around 4v which a single lithium ion cannot maintain.
Good point. I’ve emailed him some questions. I’m not sure linear would matter much for how I’ll use it, but I definitely don’t want it to cycle through modes when I run the light for less than 5 seconds.
I will use it in 2s to 30s bursts, probably 30s to 120s in between. Total run time might be 5 minutes, and I’ll have backup batteries on hand.