Nice review, as usual, HKJ - thank you. Strange that I can only find the unprotected Sanyo 18650 cells on Intl Outdoor’s site - perhaps Hank was waiting for your review before making them available.
I’ve been after this cell for a while now! Its great to see a good affordable protected version finally. The discharge curve is just perfect for high powered single cell/parallel lights, with way over 90% of the cells capacity being exhausted before the cell reaches 3.2v at 3A. ( =the light stays in regulation and doesn’t drop brightness till the cell is empty)
Time to replace my 5year old blue Trustfires, I think I’ll pick up about 6.
Same Sanyo cell, as you know, but the protection circuit shows a higher cut off value in the Intl Outdoor ones than in the Xtar. Other than that, much the same. Interesting that Hank seems to have held off putting them on sale until HKJ’s review showed them to be good (once bitten, etc etc).
I might be mistaken but I think these are different, with a stronger “knee”, the performance seems quite similar though now that I look at HKJs testing. Anyway the main reason I haven’t invested in Xtars is the size issue of them being larger than average.
Okay looks like a paid extra for smaller cells lol, HKJs data does seem to show that these cells keep up their voltage better than the Xtars though. Maybe due to lower internal resistance on the PTC or something.
Using HKJ’s data from lygte-info.dk you can see the the performance compared to others.
Our Sanyo 2600 protected batteries are very good. The voltages are higher thus better regulation on single cell powered flashlights.
Yea I was really impressed when I compared the graphs considering they are the same cells. It really shows the difference a lower resistance PTC circuit can make.
I was even more impressed when I compared it with the Xtar 3100!
My order was already shipped today, can’t wait! 8)
This is probably because I calculate DC resistance, not AC resistance. This is calculate from the discharge test. For the second test run on battery A I get:
Voltage at 5.5A -> 3.647
Voltage at 7.5A -> 3.425
Ri -> (3.647-3.425)/2 -> 0.111 ohm
From the 10 values (Two batteries with each 5 runs) I take the highest value for my table (Except if the battery drains, then I uses a value from before this happens).
The resistance is not high, it can be seen compared to the rest of the brands and the discharge graphs I posted earlier demonstate exactly that.
Internal resistances measured by HKJ for protected Sanyo 2600 batteries, all adata according to lygte-info.dk