Review: Olight S1R Baton (Cool white, 900 lumens)

Olight S1R Baton

MSRP: $65


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Olight Direct Affiliated Ebay Link: http://t.cn/RCLyNj4
Full Link: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Olight-900lm-S1R-Turbo-S-Cree-XM-L2-LED-Magnetic-Rechargeable-EDC-Flashlight-/162332141271?ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT

I was sent this light to review free of charge but, as always, I've tried to be as unbiased as possible.

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TL;DR

The Olight S1R Baton is a very compact light that's well-suited for EDC. The magnetic charging would make it great for a novice user, but the live contacts and the lack of a lens makes it unsuited for harsh use.


Packaging

The S1R is packaged in a plastic box with a window that shows the light inside. The back of the box has all of the specs on it, including outputs, runtimes, candela, waterproof and impact ratings, weight, and dimensions. It's a very informative box, and it would do a great job of letting a customer know exactly what they were buying.
The box was designed to be opened in a very specific way. The blue tab on the back peels up to open the top flaps of the box, and the first thing you see when you open those flaps is a bright yellow warning card. See the "Battery and charging" section for more on this.


Once you throw that warning card away, you're greeted by a very friendly instruction manual... on how to unpackage your S1R. It seemed silly at first, but I found it helpful. The packaging isn't super intuitive.

Contents

The box contains:

  • 1 Olight S1R Baton flashlight
  • 1 lanyard with threader
  • 1 magnetic charging cable
  • 1 user manual
  • 1 drawstring bag

Build

The S1R is well built, just like all of the other Olight products I've used. This is my first 16340 light and it's smaller than I thought it would be. It makes my Zebralight SC62w look big, and is only slightly larger than an 18650.

The anodizing is smooth and doesn't have any flaws that I can see. No tool marks are visible. The bezel and button are press fit and colored the classic "Olight blue". The bezel on mine is a bit scuffed. All of the screenprinting is well done, with no bleeding and no thin spots.


The S1R's tailcap threads are shallow, but they're square cut and very smooth. The battery contacts are stiff and gold plated.

The tailcap contains a strong magnet which can securely attach the S1R to any flat, magnetic surface.


The S1R, like most of Olight's Baton series lights uses a TIR optic instead of a reflector. The TIR optic isn't flat like I expected it to be. It's concave, with a little bump in the middle. It's worth noting that this is a plastic TIR optic, and it isn't covered by a glass lens. I've EDC'd it for a week, and it hasn't gotten scratched yet, but it could happen. I don't know how much a scratch would affect the beam, but it would bother me whether it did or not.
The head of the light has a hexagontal section that the button rests on. I assume that this is meant to be an anti-roll feature, but it didn't do a lot to prevent the light from rolling. The button is more effective at preventing rolling, and the clip does a very good job of it.

Clip and Lanyard

The clip on the Olight S1R Baton is sturdy. It's as thick as Convoy's pocket clip, but stiffer. It's a deep carry clip, and it fits into a groove above the button and can be rotated around to wherever you want it. I'm not a fan of this clip for three reasons. (Warning: Clip Snobbery ahead)

  1. Nearly all deep carry clips catch on the edges of my pockets. See in this photo of the light where the clip rises up off of the body of the light a couple of milimeters before going up towards the head and curving back down? That's where my pocket gets stuck. Every. Single. Time. Some clips solve this by not rising off of the body, but that wouldn't work due to the hexagontal section on the S1R. ArmyTek is the only manufacturer that I know of that has made a good deep carry clip that isn't flush with the body. Their clip for the Wizard has a little ramp for the edge of your pocket so it doesn't get stuck.
  2. It doesn't work well when reversed. I don't like head-up carry, but because of the length of the clip and the size of the S1R, the clip doesn't work nearly as well if you flip it around. When put on the other way around, the end of the clip is almost flush with the bezel, and most of the weight of the light is above the clip. Another clip groove on or near the tailcap would have been an excellent decision.
  3. The little grippy thingy in the fold of the clip. This little sliver of metal is meant to more firmly grasp whatever the S1R is clipped to. It does a good job of this, but the sliver also makes it harder to completely clip to things. It's redundant anyway; the clip is stiff enough that it does a very good job of pinching your pocket between itself and the battery tube.

The body tube of the Olight S1R isn't that much smaller than that of a 1" 18650 light, so many clips that work with 18650 lights will also work with the S1R. Finding one short enough for it might be tricky though.

Olight includes a lanyard as well, which is very nice. It isn't flat webbing, it's round cord with Olight's logo embroidered onto it. Attached to the lanyard is a small piece of wire. I didn't understand what this was at first, but soon figured out that it's to help thread the lanyard though the small lanyard hole in the tailcap. I really love this attention to detail. Threading lanyards though lanyard holes can be frustrating, but this tiny piece of wire makes it very, very simple.

Beam and tint

The Olight S1R comes in cool and neutral white. I got the cool white version. The neutral white version isn't as easy to find, unfortunately. As far as cool white lights go, it isn't bad. Here are some comparison beamshots. On the left we have the cool white S1R and a light with a Nichia 219b 4000K 90 CRI LED, and on the right the S1R is compared to the equivalent 219c. (Sorry about the bad beamshots, my camera isn't great.)

There isn't a lot of green in the beam, and the tint doesn't shift. It has a typical TIR beam: big hotspot, minimal spill.

Like the Olight H2R Nova, the S1R Baton's beam has four "points" coming off of the hotspot. It's a lot more noticeable in the S1R. These points aren't all the same size or brightness either, which leads me to believe that the emitter isn't perfectly centered. Whether this is actually the case, I don't know. If the brightness is PWM controlled, I couldn't notice it.

UI and Modes

The S1R's UI is simple to use. One press to turn the light on in the last memorized mode, one press to turn off, press and hold from off to turn the light on in moonlight mode, press and hold when on to cycle from low to high, double press at any time to go to turbo 1, double press in turbo 1 to go to turbo 2. The S1R also has an electronic lockout function and a timer function, which shuts the light off after either 3 or 9 minutes. This is the first time I've seen a light with a timer function and I think it's pretty neat. I personally can't think of a use for it though. The mode spacing of the main modes (12, 60, and 300 lumens) is good, but the two turbo modes don't make all that much sense to me. 600 and 900 lumens aren't all that different, and I don't see the point in having two seperate modes for them. It would make more sense to just have the 900 lumen mode.

Temperature

I didn't know where else to put this, so here it is. The Olight S1R gets hot when you leave it on turbo for a long time. No surprise there.

Battery and Charging

Olight's magnetic charging system involves live contacts on the tailcap. This is a problem, and once people started talking about it, they added a "DO NOT SHORT CIRCUIT" warning to the tailcap and a little yellow card, just to make that warning extra clear. It seems like a CYA move more than anything else. I have heard that Olight has a fix in the works for their next lines of lights, so that's nice.


The S1R Baton uses a proprietary 550mAh protected 16340 cell. I'm not going to cut the wrapping off of this one. The light itself doesn't seem to have LVP, although it does shift into a lower mode when the voltage gets low. In all of my tests, the protection circuit on the battery that came with *my* S1R seems to trip once the cell reaches 3.25V. This is (at least) .25V too high. Maukka, a prominent user on BLF and /r/flashlight, said that the protection circuit on his Olight S1R cell tripped once the cell go to 2.5V. This leads me to believe that there is a problem with the protection circuit on my cell. It's worth noting that my S1R was still able to do 300 lumens for over an hour, despite the high termination voltage.


The light comes with a magnetic USB charger. This snaps securely onto the tailcap. So securely that it can support the whole weight of the light. A light built in to the cable changes from red to green when the battery is charged. In my tests the charger pulled 0.8A from my USB power supply. This is higher than I would have expected for a 16340 cell, but I'm not complaining.

Modding

Disclaimer: Do this stuff a your own risk. If you mess up and break something, that's on you.


The S1R's tailcap is held together with a retaining ring. It isn't reverse threaded and it doesn't have any thread locker on it, but it's still very tight.

If you do manage to get it out , it's entirely possible to remove the capability of magnetic charging, along with the danger of the live contacts. When done correctly, the tailcap keeps its water resistance and strong magnet, and the light functions as normal.


Bottom line

Praises

  • Small and compact
  • Perfect for coin pocket EDC
  • No visible PWM
  • User focused design
  • Shortcuts to moonlight and turbo

Criticisms

  • Live contacts on the tailcap
  • QC issues? (Scuffed bezel, protection circuit tripping too early)
  • Unnecessary second turbo mode
  • Bad clip
  • Strange beam pattern

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions about this light, don't hesitate to ask.