No problem, thank you; that helps my understanding.
Looks like a mule, only the white cup scavenges more side-thrown light and diffuses it forward(ish).
First seller didn’t ship, second seller did ship and then it got stuck in “customs” for a month.
Got this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32947942168.html
Turns out the torches which go for this white thing are diving torches often with suggestions of providing photography light, and it’s probably no cheaper than an aluminium reflector because on opening this one up it’s a machined white plastic cup in about a 90 degree cone.
You get a big puddle of even light as a “mule” does except this is a factory design and it has something instead of nothing where a reflector would be. I suspect the cup and the distance from the lens is to force a tighter puddle while keeping the lack of hot spots. If you instead rammed the bare led up to the lens it would have an enormously wide puddle.
4 modes on twist switch does not feel good scrubbing the double o-rings back and forth. I’m going to pretend the other modes don’t exist and or stick a single mode driver in there.
So did you get the flashlight that you wanted?
There are several ways to get a diffused beam, such as using a frosted lens or TIRs. Not sure why you wanted a white cup vs a reflector, but it seems interesting.
I think it’s acted as a gasket, to keep the LED centered and to press the led board (MCPCB) to the pill/body so that it won’t fall off. Never seen those plastic stuff on any website for sale though.
Kinda, the switch is less than ideal but it’s the light pattern I wanted.
There’s no pattern, no hotspots. It puts out light like a zoom but much wider, about a 4m circle of light at bit over 2m distance. Still much tighter than the super wide cone of a bare led.
I was thinking about the point of a hotspot in a flashlight at close range. You get a harsh brightness difference within the light which distorts what you see. So I went looking for a flashlight with no reflector and not a zoom either because it also bugs me that most of the head of a zoom is insulated from the led with o-rings. This is mostly one large piece and the endcap and it seems to easily manage the heat of using 11W on a fresh battery.
So this does a large even light puddle quite a lot like having a household light on and it does basically nothing at long range.
The shallow plastic cup is machined out of nylon rod I think. It’s not like the gaskets that go between an aluminium reflector and the led board.
The internal cone is steeper than the external one.
