Not even info on Mag’s home page about 3rd gen. These will still be bought by many with the new “higher lumen” ratings. Maglites after all are an American tradition so to speak.
Well, I just bought a Black 3D ST33016 and a Black 2D ST23016 for $77 shipping included, (about $38.50 each). In a few days I will do a review of them. I'm looking forward to it. If they are bright, it would be a good option to do my file work on them and be able to keep the overall price down. All I plan on is adding a glass lens.
Not really a like for like comparison though is it. The Mag runs on cheap, everywhere available D cells. the C8 does not. And I suspect the Mag will wipe the floor with the C8 in terms of run time.
Imagine if it was a Chinese company producing flashlight with problems like this the Americans would definitely call it “chinese crap” without a second thought lol.
Good engineering means that a product is neither over engineered nor under engineered. Chinese products often times have NO engineering, and are sometimes just copies of someone else’s design with cost reductions with no thought as to the functionality of it. I have seen so much stuff from China that are obviously copies of something, but have NO chance of being useable because of the cost reductions that render the item worthless. I am not just referring to flashlights.
Maglites on the other hand are engineered to be USED and abused. We as flashaholics can tolerate some issues with the Chinese copies of lights that we buy, but the general public can not. For them a flashlight needs to just work.
(Full disclosure - I also posted this at CPF, but no one seems to care.)
I was in Wally-World, and went to the flashlight section (of course) to see if they had anything new. I noticed the 2D LED on the racks, and something caught my eye.
412 meters. So I looked at the rest of the specs: 168 lumens, 42533cd, 6h45min. The LED is still small, but there is not green. I’m thinking it’s an XP-E2, but It’s hard to tell though the packaging. That would explain the increased throw. The body still looks like the classic 2D.
The 3D still has the XP-E, but maybe those are old stock.
I find this interesting, as the 3rd Gen (with XM-L2) seems to blow away the regular LED models in every way except throw. I figured the 3rd Gen was going to replace the old one, but it seems like we have a choice between the two. The price was around $35.
I wonder if HD or Lowes will carry these for 14.95 on Black Friday like they usually do. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we just get the xpe versions. I’ll be watching.
If Lowe's has anything for Black Friday, I would imagine it will be the older LED Maglites. The new 3rd GEN are not in stores yet. Only online and only in a couple of places. Apparently they have not started regular production yet, either that or there's a ton of the old ones dtill out there. I suspect the latter. I did notice Lowe's had dropped the price on their 2D LED inventory, so maybe they are cleaning house for the Black Friday sale? Or the new 3rd GEN coming? Maybe not.