I hate to sound like the negative nancy here, but I received this light recently and while it’s a decent little AA light it’s not without a few complaints.
Firstly the switch. It is much too small and very very difficult to locate by feel alone. The tiny button sits nearly flush with the surface and its difficult to activate quickly, especially with larger hands and forget about with gloves on. Aligning the pocket clip with the switch helps give some tactile cues as to where to press when it’s pitch black, but its still not very fast or user friendly.
Take the Zebralight SC52 for comparison, it uses a much larger side button which is easier to feel and activate, and then it is recessed so that you can clearly find the button by feel alone very quickly. The pocket clip is bolted in place which means it always helps align you with the button once you get used to it. The same can’t be said for the WK41, although the pocketclip isn’t that big of a deal.
The second issue I have is also related to the switch, but more about the UI and buttons timings. Double clicking to select special modes is fine, however the timing requires you double click the button extremely fast, to the point where I cannot reliably get to the blinks modes. This seems like a bad idea for a feature that may be needed in very dire situations.
Thirdly, and again still on the switch, the amount of time required to turn the light off is annoyingly long at 1.5 seconds. It sounds quick on paper, but in actual EDC use it feels like an eternity, and the thought of waiting on my flashlight is absurd to me. Fenix uses a long click to turn some of their lights off, but their timing seems to be a bit better thought out, or I’m just impatient.
Finally with so many normal modes to cycle through I feel like they missed a real opportunity to do something with a long-click from off, either for momentary on, or direct access to high or some other setting. Cycling through 4 modes to get the one needed is again an exercise in patience with this light, in fact everything about this light feels like it’s testing my patience.
I will give Xtar credit for their beam and tint quality, it is quite good and somewhere between cool and neutral. The beam is fairly floody, and very smooth, a great beam for an EDC light. Support for 14500s from the manufacturer is very welcomed to see, and the low battery indicator is pretty neat, although I haven’t gotten the hang of how many minutes of light are left once it comes on. Overall this isn’t a bad light despite my numerous complaints with it, but I don’t think I would buy it again.