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.
This may not work for everyone; but you can easily sand or polish off the green tint (it’s only colored on one side). I don’t hunt, and I never used the green lens. This worked well, and took maybe 3 minutes; Can’t even tell it wasn’t always clear either.
I have never used a LEP but always wondered if the amp draw was so low why most of these lights struggle to maintain turbo? Is it because the laser module is more sensitive to heat? driver output voltage?
Specially the jetbeam which hard drops to about 50% of the output