Ok, I admit, when I first saw the Z10 at dx, I had a good laugh and contributed with enthousiasm to the dx forum thread about how ugly the light was. But I got curious as well, the specs were fairly good (suitable for 10440, led is xpeR2), it was kind of expensive (almost 20 dollars), and although the pictures let me suspect goldpainted aluminium, could it be a bit more classy than it looked? Well, I kept luring at it and it took me just over a month to decide I wanted the light anyway. It was delivered the day before yesterday, and so now I'm doing my first ever review 
So here it comes out of the box, just as cheapy shining and glittering as the pictures on dx promised 
. But boy, it is big, and heavy too. And very tight machining! Nice deep reflector. Here are some pictures:
The package claims it to be all copper, and goldplated too 
. It comes in a nice giftbox, with a 10440 trustfire battery, a weird brandless charger (US-plug 
) that charges Li-ion, NiMh and 9Vrechargables 
, a warranty card and a booklet. But no spare o-rings or anything. Specifications can be read in the picture above, with the standard 5-mode memory of xxxfire-lights, but surprise!: the specs are pretty correct too, as will be estimated later on in the review.
So let's compare it to some other AAA-lights I have:
Oh yes baby, it is the biggest of them all!!! (and the shiniest 
)
And the heaviest too, 66.2 grams, more than four times the weight of the Thrunite Ti 
(weight without battery). It is even bigger and way heavier than my smallest AA-light (4sevens quark miniAA).
I took a picture of the battery too, it is a Trustfire 600mAh (don't believe that!) 10440, it does not say so on the wrapper but it looks like it is a protected one .
The clicky is too small for my male-size fingers, which reminds me of the ultrafire A3, it is a bit of a hassle to push it in. But it is forward clicky! . I like forward clickies. It is so bad and unpractical for a 5-mode light but never mind that: I like forward clickies!
So now I should get to the performance of the Z10, but alas , the light arrived hardly in a condition that justifies actual use. So I will start with tearing the light apart, so some adjustments can be done:
Ouch, look at that led! (top right), by far the dirtiest led I have ever received in a flashlight, and way out of the middle. Actually, after removing the pill, it took me 10 minutes of careful gentle rubbing the dome with a soft wet tissue to clean the led to an extend that I trusted it to perform well enough. I could not center the led in an easy way unfortunately, it was (off-center ) firmly held in place by a plastic containing ring that I did not want to remove.
The clip was attached to a screwed-in part of the light that appeared to be (very tight) glued together, I had to warm it up to quite an extend with a small blow-torch (but not too hot because then the plastic switch under it would melt) to be able to unscrew it without damaging the light. The part appeared to be nicely threaded and even, how considerable, contained a glued-in o-ring . So I removed the glue that Trustfire never should have applied in the first place.
I really wanted to know what material the body was made of. It was heavy and I expected brass. But (see bottom right picture) after quite some sanding on the inside of the head I struck copper, apparently covered with a layer of brass. So next theorie was: copper flashlight with brass layer and some clear plastic finish to keep the brass shiny. But later a bit more about that 
.
I did not unsolder the driver from the pill to have a look at it, I may do that later some time.
I re-assembled the light and took some beamshots 1.5 meters from the wall. I compaired the Z10 with the Thrunite Ti because it is the best performing 1xAAA light I have (and around, so I believe). I took no outdoor shots (yet), mainly because I am too lazy to do that, but also because outdoor shots are not that interesting for such small lights.
It is a little thrower!! (well, not that little ). It out-throws my Ti by far, which was the best throwing AAA-light I had. The output of the Z10 on medium is just about the same as the Thrunite on high (which is about 80 60 lumens OTF), PWM on medium is 50% duty cycle according to the specs, so the output on high will be double of that: 150120-ish lumens, the trustfire specs were close! Real lumens from China for once!
I also had a look at the Z10 with a duracell alkaline, no pictures were taken, but the output looked like it was just about the same as the Thrunite Ti, so I expect it to be around 80 lumens edit 3-12: the output measures lower, less than half of the Ti, about 25 lumens.
The tint is cool white, but not as cool as the XRE Q5 lights I have, I like it better than the greenish tint of the Ti
As could be expected from the a-centered led, the shape of the beam is quite awfull, but this is in no way a problem with actual use of the flashlight. The stripes in the picture are an artifact, likely caused by the PWM of the medium mode.
I did not do any runtime-tests (edit 3-12: I did now, see below), but I do not expect the light to behave very differently from the specs (or other not too expensive AAA-lights with comparable outputs). So, according to the specs (which I believe by now), with a 10440 on high, I would expect the runtime to be (this 10440 has if we are lucky 300mAh, draw is 850mA) about 20 minutes. On an alkaline battery about an hour.
So here we are at the end of the review. The Z10 proved to be a bit more respectable than the cheap glittering promise of the pictures: actually a big, hefty copper flashlight, a fairly good performer, and it eats 10440 Li-ions, which is nice .
..............
..............
But there is one thing that keeps itching: will I actually use the light? I like weight, the sturdiness, the performance, and it is great to fiddle with, but in an actual real life use when I need some light: will I dare to take this piece of glitter out of my pocket and show it to the world? Uh, uh, no, NO, actually.
So I take out the big blowtorch and go on with some further 'fine-tuning' to the body (boewahahaa!! ) :
I was surprised, I expected to see burning plastic, but no smoke whatsoever came off, apparently the plating was all metal (gold after all???....well, not anymore now ). After this, I cleaned the parts with a brush and soap, polished it with brass-polish, and cleaned and rubbed it further. Then I put the light back together (changed the silly GITD green o-ring to a black one) and look at that:
I can take that out to the streets! It is not copper or brass-coloured, as I more or less expected, but more shiny-to-matt silver with a coloured luster, it does look very nice actually! Sort of Mad Max-style, I would think. And it doesn't wear off at all (I tried some fairly rough rubbing, even with a scourer) , so I expect it to stay like this.
Thanks for reading, it was a pleasure to do this review for you!
djozz
edit 3-12-2012:
I got out of my lazy chair and did the numbers all the same. I measured the runtime on the 10440 (the Trustfire one that came with the Z10) and on 800mAh Duracell 'stay charged' NiMh cells. I compared the Z10 with the Ultrafire A3 using the same batteries. I did not compare it with other AAA-lights I have (Thrunite Ti and the ITP A3 XPG-R5 (titanium version)) because I do not trust the heat sinking of them on 10440 batteries. I would be curious of how the Z10 compares with one of the popular Tank007 AAA-lights but alas, I do not own one (note: the UF A3 actually uses a tank007-driver). Output was estimated with a luxmeter measuring ceiling bounce:
comments:
1) all outputs were measured on 'high'. The performance of the Z10 on med and low are easily predicted from these results because PWM is used in the light (PWM is annoyingly slow by the way): med=50% duty cycle, low=10% duty cycle
2) I defined the initial output of the Z10 on a fresh 10440 battery as being 100, other measurements are given relative to that
3) initial outputs of the Thrunite Ti on 10440 and NiMh are given to give a perspective on how high the outputs are. I would guess that output 100 in the graph is a bit more than 100 in actual lumens, say 110.
4) 'STOP' is when the protection of the 10440 battery kicked in (one time at 2.97V, one time at 3.03V),
5) I also did some throw-measurements on these tiny lights (the table, top right in the graph)
I thought these measurements would not give much more information, but they actually bring some surprising results. First what was expected: the Z10 lasted about 19 minutes on the 10440 battery, a bit longer than the Ultrafire A3 and with a bit more light. This was to be be expected from using a XP-E R3 led, while the A3 uses the older XR-E Q5. Results on NiMh are more unexpected though: while the Ultrafire squeezes as much light as possible out of the Duracell till the end (30 minutes), the Z10 has a much lower output, but maintains that output for almost 2 hours. I was initially a bit dissappointed by the low output on NiMh (about 25 lumens), but then I saw the advantage as well: this light is build as a 10440 light, with a good output, throw and heatsinking, while NiMh or alkalines have their purpose as a usefull back-up: great runtime, on low it will be almost 20 hours (looks like ~3 lumens, comparable with the low on the Ti).
Then the throw measurements. I have been EDC-ing the Z10 for more than a week now (my EDC-light gets short uses: finding things, or illuminate calamities at the workfloor) and it's a fine light for that. When you look at the throw measurements you can see why: the throw of th Z10 is better than the other lights I compared it with, even when the output of those lights are better than the Z10. In a small AAA-light more throw means that it is good in pointing out things and that is exactly what I use my EDC-light for.
So how do these numbers look like in reality? A walk in the park at night gives an idea (am I the only one who gets very very suspicious looks when flashing around with lights and a camera in the dark??). I used my (not so bad at all) phone camera, but I believe (and it looks like) that the settings below a certain light level stay the same. First is a tree at 8 meters, top left Ultrafire A3 on 10440, top right Z10 on 10440, bottom left ITP A3 xpgR5 on NiMh, bottom right (for the fun of it) Romisen RC-G2(mod:2A driver and dedomed xpg2-4C) on 14500:
Then a tree at 30 meters. Left is the Trustfire Z10, middle is the Ultrafire A3, right is the modded Romisen.
As expected AAA-lights are not that impressive at 30 meters, but when in need, the Z10 can even have some use in the 'great outdoors' , just bring enough batteries (but then, they are neither big or expensive).
So this really is the end of the Z10 review, any more things about it you may find out yourself (or buy a better flashlight after reading this review 
). I may give you an update of how it looks after a year of use (can only be better ), but that's it.
