We all make mistakes. I have a 2-mode tailcap in one of my lights and I like it. Although the resister isnt that efficient, I almost never run it in low mode. In fact, thats true of almost all of my lights. lol Thanks for the report. Im still looking forward to my warm drop-in..
I just received my 5A tint drop-in today and must say that I'm quite amazed. The neutral color is so much easier on the eyes and brings out the natural colors in whatever the beam illuminates... just like the photos I linked to in the above posts. No wonder people still use incandescents. They have roughly the same tint characteristics. I'm actually glad its a single mode driver. It does many things well that I wouldn’t have expected - thanks to the neutral tint. For instance, I can look at things close up without destroying my vision and then use it as a mid length thrower to examine more distant objects... all in the same single mode! I have to adjust modes on my other white tinted lights to prevent bringing discomfort to my eyes while adjusting ranges, but not with this one. Also, this drop-in has a fantastic large bright neutral flood with a bright hotspot and an almost perfect beam with no chromatic differences throughout the entire beam width.
I haven't pulled tail currents yet but will say that its obviously not driven hard because it runs cool. I run all my drop-ins wrapped in copper foil to wick away heat from the drop-in to the host. Since this didn’t get nearly as hot as my R2 drop-in, I became suspicious. I left it running for half an hour and immediately pulled it apart to check out the internal temperatures and star to pill interface. All is well. That’s fine by me because this will be used for long night explorations deep in the woods, where runtime will be important. Besides, if it were any brighter Id feel compelled to mod it into a multimode, and then it would lose a lot of its quick aiming abilities while being easy on my eyes and semi-night vision. It will get a real workout this Friday night. I'm flying back into the Frank Church Wilderness for some camping, hiking, exploration and isolation. My 5A sits happily in my damn-good-looking chrome 504B with a thick GITD o-ring in the lens. Surprisingly, the o-ring doesn't block any of the beam output and glows like crazy when the light is off.
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Just got the LC-yellow. It's similar but slightly better than the DX neutral. It's about 4000K as they said, but NOT a p3-8b. Draw is 1.1A instead 0.6A of DX one, so it's brighter, but slightly warmer (DX is maybe 4500K).
The driver's also different. DX maintains constant current at 0.6A, so with two batteries, it's about as bright as SF, whereas the SF ramps to about that on 2 cells. However the DX maintains its brightness better as 1 cell goes down.
So there you have it. Perhaps a bit better on 1 cells, tint is close enough, but not a huge win. Worth the price.