Ebay HID 35w/28w/20w Flashlight

LED Flashlights – General Info Other Battery Type Flashlights
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Some pics from ebay


No beamshot’s at the moment but i will get around to it eventually :).

Just got one of these a few days ago from ebay seems like a fairly well built light only paid £26 with Free P+P so not expensive really for a HID although they are usually around £50 in the UK.
Nicely sized light though could do with a lanyard to secure it better i feel like it would be easy to drop as its fairly thick handled.
I also think with any of the ebay lights its best to buy on real reviews rather than what it is meant to be rated as i noticed some great ebay marketing lies like a 1600lumen single XML zoom light :).
That’s why I thought about doing this as if you go in with your eyes open to the truth you wont be so disappointed when you realise that most over rate a lot.
I think from what i have read of all these ebay HID lights all the way up to the 85w one they are usually rated at input watts rather than to the bulb so you cant really trust the specs given.

For £26 it was very good value, seems well built and overall pretty good for the lower end of the HID market.
I also have another on the way which has the larger head but same light I think it may be a later model.

Being curious about its actual Lumen output, i did a little testing with my DX Lux Meter this is what i found.

61752.25lux@1m (taken at 3.55M, may do a 10m test in the future)
That’s after focusing it it was around 40000lux@1m as it came out of the box which looked like a tight spot but i then twisted the head until by eye it looked like the brightest spot as you will have two hotspots on the arc at either end you can focus either so you may feel its focused tightly but try to look a both ends as there was a big difference for me.

I also did a ceiling bounce test
1600lumens OTF

Using my Quark on high which is meant to be 85 OTF Lumens, although i do wonder if because the quark is not very throwy compared to the HID’s that the ceiling bounce figures for the HID may be actually higher but do not know as i don’t have a integrating sphere :).
In the woods it seems more than 1600OTF but it is hard to judge that by eye.

The colour rendition is fantastic compared to my various LED lights although you forget how well the colours pop out when you have not been using hid incan for a while as most of my incan and HIDs are big thor spots so not really EDC :).

I was also interested in how much power was actually being used by the ballast so hooked it up to a 10amp PSU and it seems that its well regulated as the output did not change much from 11.1v to 14v a slight increase but not much difference compared to off the battery.
It was drawing around 3.2amps at 11.1v so looks like 35w input and at a guess of the ballast efficiency at 75% would but high mode at around 26w to the bulb.

I would like to open up the ballast at some point to see if it can be modified to give a real to the bulb 35w/28w/20w for each mode as that would be quite useful, took the screws out of the ballast to see if it would come apart easily but looked glued in and i did not try to pull it apart too hard as i wanted to play with the light before i opened it up, but may get around to that later.
As it stands the difference in the modes is tiny i noticed 8-10lux between modes.
There is also the fact that the bulbs look like the standard automotive 35w bulbs so probably getting under-driven a fair amount and i would guess on low the lumen/watt is much lower than when on high due to the nature of HID lights getting much more efficient at higher wattages.
I think at a genuine 35w the bulb it would make a great light.

It would also be nice to get a 4300k bulb and ballast for this as that should give a boost the lumens also plus nicer on the eye as its 6000k at the moment.

But overall happy with the light as I said before I have another coming with the larger head, which i think that DX SST-90 7.5cm reflector should fit in so will be interesting to see how that one compares.

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Nice find and pictures. Thanks for the time and effort to post this review. Which vendor did you purchase it from?

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It’s the first time I see review on these short version of Ebay HID flashlight, thanks!

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I got it from uk-lightszone
http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/uk-lightszone/&\_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2754

I got myself a 4300k ballast on the way so decided to take apart my old ballast to see how it was put together for future mods.

Its not too hard to take the lid off the ballast but feels like its glued down but its just a lot of potting compound which I spent a while picking off :).

You have three separate circuit boards stacked with connections to each board.

First thing I did was notice there was a resistor (think its a resistor maybe diode not sure about surface mount components) across the power input black wire and found if I jumped over that with a thin cable the output would increase a bit (went from 3.5 amps to over 4amps)
I noticed on my lux meter that was nearby it went up a small amount about from 380 to 450 when I jumped it (the ballast and bulb was clamped in vice near the lux meter).
I then bypassed it all together soldered the black wire straight to where the other end of the resistor was and the light just flickered on and off until I heard a pssst gas release sound which could either be from something inside burning up or the bulb itself venting as the ignite puts a fair amount of strain on the bulb, especially when it is flickering on off many times a second trying to ignite :).
Should have switched it off immediately but was hoping the bulb would ignite and I could measure the power so it ended up burning up.

I would not recommend doing this though, it was only because it was coming apart anyway and curiosity got the best of me :).

After that I decided it was wrecked and wanted to take it apart further to see if there was a pot that was easily adjustable, but found 4 resistors which look like the normal sense resistors you get in ebay ballasts so maybe when I get my new ballast I can see if I can up the output a little.
They are under the top half underneath the bulb mounting which is fairly easy to get to just remove three screws and pry off the lid.
So should be possible with my new ballast to take the bulb side cap off and try to add some more resistors in parallel to up the output.

The ballast when it was working powered off the bench PSU seems to get very hot to touch when out of the light, I do wonder if it would be worthwhile to put some thermal compound between the ballast and the body of the light to conduct the heat away better as its fairly loose so may not be getting good contact.
There is a thermal cut-out when it gets to hot (according to the manual) so it should be okay but would be nice to improve the heat transfer and the life of the light.

I notice that they have a bigger version of this light which has a longer 35w/28w/20w ballast(there is two different types of this ballast short and long), larger battery and bigger head.
That may be a better candidate for mods but I do like how compact this light is.

Also when my 4300k ballast comes it will be interesting to see if there is much of a increase in lumens over the 6000k standard ballast.

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Just done some quick testing with new 4300k ballast

82500lux@1m (taken at 2.5m might try a longer range test later)
That’s a 20k lux gain from original ballast which is impressive.

Doing some ceiling bounce testing i have found that the output seems a lot better and the color is much nicer to the eye.

This is what i got from using my bathroom for the test.

Quark XPG R5 2AA HIGH=85lumens OTF
Ceiling Bounce=3lux

35w/28w/20w HID
High=127lux
Medium=111lux
Low=90 lux

Skyray 4x U2 XML
High=90lux
Low=30lux

The HID does seem brighter than the Skyray and obviously has a lot more throw 80k lux vs 16k lux for Skyray, plus the color is much nicer.

I will also have to test the amount of amps the ballast is drawing at some point as it seems so much brighter than before even accounting the different color temp, makes me wonder why they don’t just ship it with 4300k from the start.

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I missed your Post 3 earlier. Thank you for the break down shots and info. Well done.

That is a neat light. Compact, good looks, and lots of output. I imagine the CRI for a 4300K HID is probably pretty high.

I tried to buy one of these a little bit ago, but the seller was a scammer. I filed a claim as soon as his ads were pulled and got my money back. Eventually, I want to get one of these. Maybe the longer 75watt version.

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I bought one early of this year from Aliexpress with 85W 6000K version, ended up as a shelf queen until now. So much regret buying it. :frowning:

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I have bought that too,Regret buying it….Any better ideas?

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What do you mean by a better idea? You mean any better suggestion other than these kind of HID flashlights?

Actually my 85W HID flashlight has nothing wrong with it (except the charger broken after few uses), it has very high output and good throw. But the problem is due to its HID lamp nature it requires warm-up time to reach full brightness, and more critically it doesn’t has meaningful medium and low modes, which mean you basically have no choice but have to operate this light in High mode, always! The “modes” of 85W/65W/45W have no much differences, all of them are still belongs to the “very bright” group.

That’s why although the FF4 is very powerful and in such a small package it still doesn’t attract me at all, because even in the “lowest” mode it will still blind yourself in close range, and having just 4 18650 batteries this light is meant to have short runtimes.

To me I started to lost interest in HID flashlights because with the current beastful LED lights I really don’t see the necessity to own a HID. Let’s say for the Super Shocker, in High mode it is a batteries drainer but you have the option to switch it into “REAL Low” and without any warm-up period!