I just picked up this light and I continue to have a problem with it becoming soft bricked. Essentially the light occasionally and randomly will go into a state where it is on, but unresponsive to any button presses. I have to disconnect the battery to get it out of this state. This seems to happen most often after programming or switching the UI groups, but I can’t reliably replicate.
I’ve emailed Zebra light customer service and they first had me troubleshoot the battery. I’ve tested with two fully charged Samsung 30q’s and I have experienced the problem several times with both batteries. Zebra light is saying that this issue is a result of a voltage drop which causes the microcontroller to stop.
I need this light to be reliable and I cannot have it doing this at random. It seems that Zebra is reluctant to say if this is a firmware bug or not. I just need to know that I’m not wasting my time getting a different unit, or if this is just problem with these lights I need to find something else.
You are not the first one who reported this recently. Not sure if and what they have changed, but there’s definitely a problem on some lights. Unstable power supply, not enough capacitance and MCU lockup as a result might be one explanation. But that would mean that it stays at max power (because there’s nothing to adjust the regulator).
Okay good to know I’m not the only one having this issue. Zebra CS is saying that it shouldn’t be happening on lower modes because “current draws are not that big and the voltage won’t drop that quick”, but out of the dozen or so times it has happened, it was on moonlight mode.
I have to say this company/product has been hyped up a lot. Now they want me to foot the bill to ship a defective product back to them? This experience is not going how I expected at all.
I have not tried that. Everything looks very clean though. It’s aggravating because these are supposedly bomb proof lights. A little smudge or dust on the contacts is going to cause the light to fail?
I just cleaned the contacts thoroughly and it is still doing it. I guess I have to pay to return a defective light. This will be the last time I ever buy a Zebra light.
Zebralight definitely has some quality control issues, especially in their first run lights.
I own or owned over a dozen Zebras. At least half of them had issues. Many of these issues were enough to render an otherwise almost brand new light non-functional.
I currently have the following defective Zebras:
SC32w - barely used. Completely non-functional.
SC5w - used for a few weeks. Lights up on moonlight only. All other brightness settings do not work.
SC64w hi - used for maybe a week. Completely non-functional. Fortunately, I have second SC64w HI that works.
One of these days I’ll get around to sending the non-functional ones back to Zebralight for repair. I might have waited too long for the 32 and the 5. No idea if Zebralight still has sufficient parts in stock to repair them. But they should be able to repair the 64 since that is a current model. All of these are out of warranty so I’ll have to pay for shipping and repair.
I had another problem with some older model Zebras abruptly dropping from high to medium mode after anywhere from 10 seconds to 1 minute. However, sticking solder braid in the tailcap spring and using a low resistance modern li-ion battery like VTC5A seems to have fixed that.
Despite these problems I still love Zebralights.
No lights from other manufacturers do what Zebras do quite as well. I love my Emisar and FW3A lights. They’re brighter. But the Zebras have much better thermal management and can sustain high brightness considerably longer. I find the Zebras to be more practical for actual use than any of my other lights.
Thanks for sharing. You certainly don’t hear about this as frequently as you hear praise. I would find it very hard to be loyal to a brand that produces such an inconsistent and unreliable product, especially one with such a premium price. I’m going to hard pass on the brand going forward. If they can’t at least stand behind their products enough to give me a damn shipping label for a defective light, then I’ll find a better brand. Any perceived advantages of their stuff goes out the window for me.
Lemons happen. If the company isn’t dealing with it properly then that is another problem entirely. I have two Zebralights and they have been great. But if I received a defective light that the company wasn’t willing to make right, I think I’d be tempted to perform a charge-back.
On the other hand, being patient with customer service anywhere will get you far. I think I’d try to reason with them about the shipping cost if this light is a recent purchase. Maybe point out that you already can’t use the light that you just received and mention how disappointed you are. Receiving a defective light and then paying for it to be returned is insult on top of injury.
My feelings exactly. I’ve only had the light for two days, and notified them of the problem on the second day. I’ve been patient but they are clearly more interested in trying to nickel and dime me than stand behind their product. It’s pretty short sighted because if I liked this light at all, I was planning on buying several others.
I’ve personally only experienced this while programming the G6/G7 modes, and one customer reported the same behaviour. I’ve since read several reports of the same sort of thing, though in most cases it’s a fleeting issue that can’t be reproduced and happens very rarely. TimMc referred to this as “switch bounce” and documented both an SC64c LE and SC64w HI with the issue here. I’ve only encountered it the one time while handling hundreds of Zebralights, but it was on a recent production LE.
I’ve seen far more complaints about malfunctioning or dead Wizards, though not too much recently. I’m not sure if that’s because they improved their QC or because people are buying fewer Armytek lights, but subjectively they seem to be discussed a lot less in general than a couple years ago.
I think I may have tracked the issue down to occuring when switching to the G6 UI group. It seem to occur pretty consistent when going from G7 to G6. It hasn’t happen when I’m just going through mode groups, but I still don’t find it to be acceptable, and I guarantee Zebra knows something more than they were sharing with me. The fact that they were trying to just blame my batteries immediately was tellling.
