Fenix PD20
I was a good light for it’s time, fenix quality but with fenix price.
I think that back then I wanted a compact light that was powerful and CR123A battery would help me. But I was wrong, I couldn’t find quality rechargable CR123A.
If it was a cheap light, I wouldn’t care but it’s a fenix.
some series are easier to swap, but be carefull not to apply too much heat or the switch will melt...
How did you get your switch out? Mine has two tiny screws on the inside, but I’m afraid of stripping threads. A small square foil spacer at tailcap end used to work with eneloops.
I think the light that was my worst buy is my Lenslight Mini.
The Lenslight Mini is an expensive 1xCR123 zoomlight. It uses an XPG R5 neutral tint. The light has 2 brightness settings on CR123 (200 lumen high, 20 lumen low). When run on higher voltage li-ion, the low setting disappears and it effectively becomes one mode.
Why I regret buying it:
- It’s huge - The light is as big and heavy as an SC600, but far less bright. It’s well built… there’s a lot of aluminum in it. But it doesn’t seem very practical and is far too big for EDC pocket carry.
- It doesn’t tailstand.
- The protruding button can easily accidentally come on in the pocket and doesn’t lockout.
- For an expensive zoomlight it doesn’t throw as far as the much smaller and cheaper Sipik 68, and cycling the zoom is a 2-handed operation.
- The pocket clip is the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s made of Delrin plastic, has sharp edges and protrudes enormously, making the flashlight much bigger. Also because of the way the clip is shaped, unclipping the light from anything is a 2-handed operation.
- The light came with too much lube in the zoom mechanism. Every time the light is cycled into spot mode it deposits a layer of grease into the revealed portion of the body … which is unfortunately right where you hand naturally goes so you get it on your hand. Wiping it off the light doesn’t help, because the next time the light is cycled a fresh layer of grease is deposited.
- It doesn’t focus very well. Unlike my Sipik 68s, my Lenslight does not produce a sharp image of the die.
- It was ridiculously expensive… over $160.
Other lights I regret buying (but none as much as the Lenslight):
(a) no-name generic 1xAA/14500 zoomies(I have a few lights like this): In flood position, the lens sits much too far above the LED. This means that flood mode is barely wider than spot mode. … so if you’re looking at something up close its like shining a light through a toilet paper tube and is basically useless. NOTE: in most cases, this problem can be alleviated by grinding away the outside of the body below the bezel to allow the bezel to retract further into the body. This results in a much wider flood mode.
(b) 1xAA inova spotlight: This is an old LED light I have. Not sure when I got it, but might be 10 or even 15 years old. It looks well built with AR coating on the lens. I haven’t opened it up, but I suspect there’s just a 5mm LED in there behind a fancy lens. It projects a perfect circle in the distance. The circle itself is a dim white with purple edges. There’s no spill at all. It’s too dim to function as a distance spotlight and the complete lack of spill makes it usless for up close.
(c ) Dorcy 1xAAA zoomie: Chrome colored screw in zoomie. The old LED used is very dim making the light rather useless. Flood mode is ok, but when cycling into zoom mode there are major problems. The zoom is cycled by simply unscrewing the head. Due to the chrome color inside the bezel, each screw thread manifests as a ring around the spot. By the time you cycle fully into spot mode there are probably 20 rings, making this tiny light a competitor for ringiest beam ever. Second, there aren’t enough threads and there’s no stop preventing the bezel from coming all the way off. If you want to cycle until you see an image of the die, you have to unscrew the bezel completely and basically hold it loose in your hand in front of the rest of the light.
(d) Sunwayman V11a XPG: Expensive $90 magnetic ring AA light with cool white XPG. Dropped the head from 3’ onto a wooden floor while changing the battery. It landed bezel down. No external damage to the head… not even a scratch. But a surface mount device on the driver popped off and it never worked again.
(e) Jetbeam BK135a: Cool-looking 1xAA light with camo body, with a nice programmable driver. Driver overheated and died after just 5 minutes of use. Sent it away for warranty repair. Received it back 2 months later, but instead of the nice limited edition programmable driver, Jetbeam replaced the driver with a crappy non-programmable one from their production version of the light. Lame!
The original CMG Infinity.
I got this around 2000 or so. Despite its namesake and manufacturer claims that it would last forever, it worked for about a day and then refused to turn on no matter what I did. Some part of the electronics inside apparently died and, despite the “lifetime” warranty, no repair or replacement was ever offered when I contacted the company about it.
When it worked, though, it was basically a 5mm LED mule which put out about a lumen of ~10000k blueish light in a 120-degree beam with no hotspot. It could do this for about 40 hours per AA cell, though I suspect that time was measured until its output fell below 1%. It was a one-mode twisty battery crusher, off or on. Physically built like a tank, but apparently the internals weren’t so robust. Also, no tail-standing and the clip simply wrapped around the smooth round body so it was never very secure.
The modern equivalent, the popular 1xAA tube light, is a popular and useful class of products. But this one was never very good, even when it was new. For reference, it could produce up to 5 lux at 1 meter, or about 0.6 lumens, which means that, on a fresh battery, it would look slightly brighter than a ZL SC52’s 0.34lm moon mode. (calculated based on selfbuilt’s lumen/lux measurements and “dansdata”’s measurements)
—
Update: After looking into it a bit, I found that this was apparently a very common problem (despite the manufacturer’s claim that they had never heard of anything like it), and Dan from dansdata (the most famous light reviewer back in ~2000) published a workaround for it way back in 2002:
I just tried this, and it’s now working again for the first time in like 13 or 14 years. Maybe if I sanded off the massive lanyard ring, it could at least make an okay candle. It sure is a blue beam though… it makes my cheap ~7500K lights look warm.
It’s too bad I didn’t know about this easy fix 13 years ago when a portable blue lumen would have actually been useful.
Ouch, that sounds pretty terrible. A $160 downgrade from a SK-68?
Also ouch. I’m glad my RRT01 didn’t react like that when it ran into concrete. It was clipped to the outside of my purse when the purse fell off a table onto concrete. The RRT01 hit first, with the weight of the entire purse behind it. The result is a bit of body damage visible from a few meters away:
The RRT01 was not a bad buy though. It’s one of my nicest lights, even if it’s a bit wide or stubby for my taste and has short-ish runtimes. 
NiTech TriColor, allegedly made for the British army (also came with a NATO item number; if such a thing does even exist).
Nice and sturdy ABS construction, intersting internal colour filter selector, and came with the most primitive, yet ingenous switch ever. The only problem, besides the anaemic Mini-M@glite incan bulb, is that it’s not working at all due to a broken ground strap. Promised myself to mod it one day, wedge in a slug of solid copper, an XP-G2 powered at three-plus amps, and find out when ABS will actually melt.
While the NiTech 2AA torch does actually score some points after all (the body is very well made, and oi! - it’s a combat torch for Her Majesty’s Armed Forces… allegedly, at least), I absolutely disliked the TrueUtility TRUELITE 0.5W keyring light. I’ve got two of those; one still in its original packaging; but it would be far too embarrassing to give it away. I’d rather donate a box of matches; not only they’d be brighter, but more reliable as well. The other one I keep amonst my collection as a reminder that sometimes, a nice design will come with absolutely horrible craftsmanship. It’s best use would be to take up space in a dustbin, and it even manages to fail this simple task… that tiny, miserable waste of aluminium!
Easily, this light is my contender for "Worst Buy"; not even sure why I ordered the thing:
http://dx.com/p/flood-to-throw-white-light-led-flashlight-with-carabiner-clip-1-aaa-33326
Horribly dim, and much too large for a AAA light. Might have been okay if it wasn't ~99% big enough to take a AA but with a plastic spacer for the AAA.
Second (and here comes the hate) is my SK-68! It's an awesome light but is not convenient. The narrow body with the larger steps at the tail and head make it less convenient as an EDC. Mine never gets used, even after a driver upgrade to boost the brightness to DD-level!
@ Chloe... I really like my TK-703! I love such a tiny light with the crazy throw that little SMO reflector gives! Yeah, three big issues... First, lack of a spring on the tailcap. I fixed that one. Second, too short for protected cells. Oh well. I'll just use my blue Ultrafires until they blow up. Third, the glued-on head. I ended up scuffing the body on mine trying to get it apart. Then fried the driver trying to turn it into a tiny aspheric thrower.
I bought one of those that stopped working. When sticking a meter on it to check tail cap current it wasn't emitting any light but was pulling 8 amps from an Ultrafire 18650.
Guess what?
It got binned.
Bought one of those too. Fed it a 10440 to finish it off...
I actually like those :)
I have several as they eventually wear out and the heads fall off.
My worst buy was one of the first, a generic one of those floating pill 18650/3xAAA zoomies with the green ring. It is impressive looking but the workmanship inside is poor, as well as the design. (I do have a Smiling Shark SS-8027 with floating pill that I like. It has nice fins on the pill, is well made and is very unusual.)
I have one $3 SK68 that I cannibalize for o-rings because it didn’t have enough tail threads to get it not to cross thread, and one $10 UltraFire XM-L zoomy that I took the pill out of to use in cooling tests and the lens as a magnifying glass. The latter convinced me that if UltraFire is anything but a label, it has no consistent quality control.
I don’t use any of my older lights much. I keep my Tekna Monolith in my day hiking pack and have used it when I was still out by dark. I have an incan. 2D zoomy in the trunk of one car. I used the Maglight Solitaire to read a thermometer without spoiling my eyes’ adjustment to the dark. The multi 5 mm led lights and converted incandescents will be useful when there is a long power outage.
I don’t really use my TangsFire C8 for anything, except to gaze at the build and feel the weight, as I have not gone camping and the spill would blind on-comers in the city.
Sunwayman V11R with AA extension…the only light I sold a few months after buying it. It wasn’t a bad light, but I didn’t like the beam, the efficiency was a bit disappointing, and the magnetic ring had a high tendency to stay stucked on min or max. Too bad because it was very well built, and I liked the magnetic ring concept !
I’ve also been disappointed by the Olight S10 titanium (horrible green tint due to lens and emitter)…but my girlfriend liked it (it looks like she doesn’t care about the tint)!
I have some lights that i NEVER use:
sk98
sk68
Police 1 mode
+ some other small or zoomable lights. Thought in the beginning that 5 modes and zoom would be cool, but nowadays i prefer simple and efficient 1-3 mode lights. I also have some larger lights that I don`t use much but I don`t want to name them because they never dissapoint me when I use them.
My first message here, yippee!
TrustFire Z8. Heavy, crap tint & PWM.
Welcome to the forum, elias83!
I, too, have switched from zoomies to more traditional lights. I find them more useful overall. However, zoomies do have a few uses which nothing else can really do well:
- Consistent, even, flat lighting for photography. I’ll often grab a zoomie when taking pictures indoors, because nothing else can produce such a consistent level of brightness across the entire beam.
- Long throw in a small package. A cheap SK-68 will out-throw almost everything else in my collection, and the lack of any spill makes it easier to see things in the distance because the spill isn’t blinding me.
- Pointing at things without a laser.
- Projecting images. This is my favorite use for zoomies. Zoom to the narrow mode, attach a transparency in front of the lens, and aim at a loupe / magnifying glass. It’ll project the image on the transparency, much like the signal Gotham City used to call Batman for help.
- Makeshift light saber when it’s foggy outside.
I don’t use my zoomies often, but I’m glad to have a few available… especially when it’s just $5 for a SK-68 that works better than a $35 Nebo Redline.
As long as I’m rambling about Nebo products… I stopped by Batteries Plus today for the first time in a year or so. There’s one next to my favorite burrito place.
While the selection at B+ has definitely improved over the past year, I still didn’t see anything there which seemed worth buying. There were a bunch of new Nebo-brand lights which use LEDs I couldn’t identify, claiming about 60 or 90 lumens. They were either 1-mode or 2-mode (high, strobe), and the build quality was a bit lower than I’d expect even from a $2 clone-of-a-clone light from China. One model was a “CSI” (crime scene investigation) something or another, with a rather tall and sharp attack bezel. Sharp enough that they had to put up a sign telling people to be careful because the store can’t be held liable for people cutting themselves. Try carrying that light in your pocket.
Hmm, a quick web search tells me that this isn’t their first model in that line. One of the first reviews I see explains that this extra-sharp bezel is an upgrade from the previous model: “REMOVABLE strike bezel— I’ve taken mine past TSA six times” … I’m really not sure what to say, when that is one of the main selling points.
They still had the same old Nebo Redline, for the same old $35 price, which is basically a larger, harder-to-use, 3xAAA, shorter-lived equivalent of a SK-68. But this time they also had a Redline “Select”. I couldn’t see what was different about it, except that it claimed to do 310 lumens and costs $50. It’s worth noting that the XR-E emitter inside isn’t rated to go up to 310 lumens though, and zoomies are notorious for having a significant drop from emitter lumens to OTF lumens. But maybe they fixed the issues which caused the older models to burn out so fast.
They had a bunch of lights from TerraLux too, which I hadn’t heard of before today. Some of them looked genuinely kind of okay, though overpriced. Like, they have a 1xAA headlamp and a 2xCR123 headlamp which both seemed like they could be pretty decent (though a bit low on features). And a 2xAAA penlight claiming “high CRI” (80 CRI) with 80 lumens (or was it 60?). However, even their brightest and most expensive light ($150ish, ~680 lumens, tactical surefire clone) seemed nowhere near what we can get for a tenth the price with a Convoy C8.
Overall, it was nice that their selection has improved, but it was still disappointing. Not one torch in the entire store gave any data on color temperature (not even claiming “cool white” or “neutral white”, and very few gave anything like ANSI specs. I don’t think they had ever heard of sub-lumen moon/firefly modes, and most of the “low” modes were at least 20 lumens. It also seemed that nothing there was recent enough to use current-controlled output instead of PWM. They still don’t sell eneloops. But at least they’ve mostly moved on from the days of cramming as many 5mm LEDs as possible into a torch.
I guess this only fits into “worst buys” because my dad bought a Redline. As far as I’m aware, it basically burnt itself out in a few months, and he now uses the 3-mode SK-68 I gave him as a replacement.
A Nebo Red Line was the first powerful flashlight I had, and one I got before that had maybe the first non-5mm led I had, along with green UV and red laser. Still our best UV source. I is beautifully finished, and the Red Line is also in a Buck Rogers sort of way. Too bad they haven’t kept up.
Review: Tank007 E07 BLF Edition 3 Mode AA/14500
Google this .
Yeesh . Still disappointed after all this time .
But hey , it does say BLF on it ...
…also, it’s dim and overheats…it’s got everything. 