After a failed de-dome attempt on a Z8 with an XML, me and my brother decided to see what that little light would do with a new XPG2. This was our first attempt at modding other than a A60 that needed the pill cleaned off and the star reapplied with thermal paste, but no soldering involved.
So thanks to a fellow member, we acquired a nice adjustable soldering station and went to work. I can’t say the contacts were overly pretty when we were done, but the job got done successfully with a nice XPG2 star sitting in place of the dead XML star. We have another working Z8, so we were able to do some nice comparisons between the two. Here are the results -
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Z8 - XML - 361otf - 6450cp
Z8 - XPG2 - 319otf - 10,025cp
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Both lights were tested with ET 14500 at about 4.11V at test time.
The one twist to this is we also did a tailcap reading for both lights afetrwards and I’m not sure about something. The XML light measured 1.8amps at tailcap, but the XPG2 only measured 1.52amps at the tailcap. So this is where my knowledge is lacking - Is the tailcap amps on the XPG2 light lower because it doesn’t need the higher amps that XML’s do? Or is that driver just simply weaker? For curiosity we also tetsed the amps with aw imr’s. Better, but similar results, with the XPG2 light reading 1.87amps and the XML light reading 2.19amps. Unfortunately we didn’t do a tailcap reading before hand, so we don’t know if it was weaker to begin with or not.
Anyway, over all we’re pretty pleased with the outcome with the swap. The Z8 still produces about 90% the lumens it use to, but it produces about 160% the throw it it did before. Not a bad mod at all. A nice one anyway for our first real mod.
I took some comparison pics with my cell phone on full auto settings so they turned out pretty crappy. One kind of interesting thing is the die image projected by the xp-g2. It is shaped like the xre image but instead of the wires it has kind of a pin cushion effect. Kind of cool I think. Another note is the xp-g2 is a 3d tint which I think is considered nw so that might have some bearing on brightness. All in all I am very pleased with our first real mod. I have been a cool white tint snob since becoming involved in lights but I have to admit shining this nw z8 on the fall trees tonight really made the true colors pop out. I will always prefer cw on my serious throwers but am truly impressed with this nw light. I dont know how well you can see the differences but here are the pics anyway. I will try to get some more with a camera with some manual settings tomorrow.
The first pic is the xml
the second is the xp-g2
the last one is the xp-g2 over the xml