Eachbuyer gave me this light.
Its a diving light which runs with a 26650 and has a modeselection ring. It is kind of a “26650 C8” which made it interesting for me. There are some different versions around, which all are a bit different in pill design and overall quality there are also some other reviews of these similiar lights on the forum…
Now over to my findings of this exemplar:
The kit came with a charger, a uk adapter,a 18650 sleeve and a Ultrofite 18650:
Two orings on each side:
Dimensions:
The head Diameter is 53mm, the total length is 150mm. tube diameter is 30mm
Ultrofite 4200 mAh tested at around 850mAh:
It says protected but I am not sure of this, I will find out after discharging and before tossing…
I dont like these cheap chargers and I haven’t tested it entirely because of safety reasons, but it works and it has a indicator LED. The slide length is long enough even for 70mm batteries, so this maybe find another life as a charging cradle.
I made a comparison Photo showing it to a X8 and a C8, the size is very comfortable for use…like I said above its a thicker C8…
The light itself has a poor, flaky anodizing in grey. Especially the head has some lighter grey spots and the tailcap edge is rough and has some defects. It came with dirt on the threads and lens. I would rate this as normal for a budget light so no biggie for me.
Light output
In stock form with the ultrofite it makes around 300lm and 1.7A
On a Samsung20R it makes around 400 lm at 3.3A
Of course this is due to bad thermal design and the huge plastic ring around the LED. I did a short throw test at 2m and I could easily get around 3000-4000 lux so throw is C8 niveau(what a suprise…)
I played around some days with this light and the ultrofite battery inside and showed it to other people and the overall conclusion was that the form and function is good. Of course the lightoutput is poor in our eyes but it works well enough because of the tight hotspot and good throw.
The UI is simple:
the Selector ring has three positions: On OFF Disco
If you now twist from off to the left it starts in High, if you go back to off and after that to on again it switches in med mode….
Its simple but works very good, with 4 different brightnesses
On the right side this has 4 different blinky modes SOS, 1Hz Strobe, 3Hz strobe and 9Hz strobe
No memory so you can always start in high with a quarter twist.
Standby current is low and the light can be locked out via tailcap
Waterproof?
Then I made me some thoughts about testing its waterproofness and decided to do a quick test in a waterbowl:
The result after short time(maybe 2 hours) was disapointing, there was water inside the head on the lens:
I opened and dried and investigated the reason:
You can see the dissassembled head here:
bezel, 47mmx2.6mm plastic lens, C8 SMO reflector, and head with large O-ring:
Normal setup which should have let no water inside…right?
No definitive wrong build:
You can clearly see that the Reflector is higher than the oring because the oring is not laying on a plain surface its in a groove and doesnt makes contact/seal to the lens…
Picture of the problem/groove:
I guess if I would fill up the groove with something, maybe a thick wire, glue or whatever, the oring would be thick enough to be higher than the reflector and seal it up…
Pill and driver design
Now over to the Pill. There are versions with a pill and reflector screwed together and making poor contact to the head this one is different.
20mm Star and 20mm driver.
From battery side there is a retaining ring which can be screwed out easily. The driver has two magnetic sensors for the different positions of the selector ring. The driver and LED sit inside what looks like a hollow pill, but I wasn’t able to unscrew it yet.
The driver looks very simple, just some voltagedividers for batterymonitoring, magneticsensors for modes and a controller which drives a FET with PWM.
It could be modded with a tiny to other modeselction but I dont see much better possibilities with these two positions, from off to the left it always starts in high with the option to use a lot o other modes if needed I find this good. The Fet gives a lot of Amps so onresistance is good too…
Conclussion:
Pro:
nice form factor->C8 reflector, 26650 capable
selector ring
8 modes: high, med, low, lower low along with SOS,and 1Hz,3Hz and 9Hz beacon/strobe
works good with the parts provided in the kit
Standby current is low and the light can additionally locked out via tailcap
Cons:
a classic budget light with lots of small lacks with some serious modding necessary to achieve convoy C8 level->fill out hollow pill, close groove for oring along with the standard mods
I am no fan of the ultrafire ultrofite batterys and cheap chargers
not waterproof diving light is very paradox