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.
Running them on 18650’s is easy if you want to change the electronics. But much harder if all you want to do is change the battery source.
2D = 3.0v
So chances are it’s some kind of boost driver to get the correct vf for the LED. A single li-ion is going to more than likely fry one of these.
3D = 4.5v
So more likely a linear or buck driver and certainly in a similar realm to a single li-ion. But tbh I’d feel kind of stupid carrying a 3D around with just a single 18650 floating about in the body.
So you’d either want to cut the body down, or have some fancy carrier for parallel 18650’s.
As for AA. Easy, Eneloop do 1AA to D cell holders and you can easily pick up 2AA ones and maybe even 3AA ones. Just make sure they are parallel not series.
The only down side will be runtime vs the D cell. A D cell is what, 15,000mAh or more. NiMh AA’s are normally 2000-2500mAh. So even with 3 per holder that’s circa 6000mAh at best.
Forgive my ignorance, but what would need to be changed in electronics of the light to allow for running an 18650?
Is it possible that instead of LED swaps, we’ll see switch swaps? Or would modifcations of these new 3rd Gen lights require both new switches and new LEDs?
Ahh, so it would burn through 3xAA in Parallel pretty darn quick. A little under 3 hours probably on high.
Heck, it would burn through 3400mAh 18650s pretty quickly as well. You’d have to parallel bi/tri-bore to get decent run times. Now I know why people prefer to run the 26650 in “forget about it” lights like Mags.
You can run a single 18650 or 26650 with a dummy cell, in the 3rd GEN 2D Maglite. I already have done it and it works fine with the stock driver. That's 3rd GEN.
** As far as the quality, let me qualify that statement. Maglite is not as good of quality as it was, but I am very picky. Little niggles are huge things to me and Maglite is still the absolute best quality over ANY Chinese light I have ever had! That is just a fact, as far as I am concerned.