Review: Brinyte B21 Complex (new release)

gchart · 2018-05-11T21:58:36.000Z

Brinyte B21 Complex

Introduction: Brinyte reached out to me and offered the opportunity to review their upcoming light, the B21 Complex. While the flashlight was provided for free, I try to be unbiased. That said, as far as I can tell, this is a pre-production sample. The finished product that goes up for sale may vary slightly from what you see here. Overall it’s a pretty cool and unique flashlight, but hopefully it’s not too late to make a couple minor changes…

Fit & Finish: Overall, the anodizing and accents remind me very much of my favorite zoomie, the B158. The anodizing is pretty good on my sample, slightly on the glossy side. The tube has a couple rings of very light knurling, and there seemed to be a little bit of misalignment in the middle of each ring - I’m being a bit picky there, but if you’ve got OCD, you’d notice it.

LEDs & Tint: The business end of the B21 consists of 4 different LEDs, each well centered in it’s own smooth reflector cavity. According to this Facebook post the 4 LEDs are Red, Green, IR850, and White. I wasn’t really sure what I’d do with the IR as I don’t have any nightvision equipment, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that instead of IR, my sample has UV. While I haven’t got a good enough view of the UV LED to identify it, the red and green appear to be XP-E2’s and the white is an XP-L HI, just on the cool side of neutral (perhaps 5500K). The primary reflector is sized somewhere between a Convoy M1 and C8. Equipped with the HI, it’s pretty throwy.

Modes & UI: Unfortunately, my sample didn’t come with a manual and I haven’t found anything online, so this is based purely on observation. White has two modes, low and high. Each of the other three colors only has one mode. The tailcap has two switches built in: a forward clicky to control the white and a single e-switch to control the other three. The white LED operation is standard fare, switching between low and high with memory. The e-switch operation took some experimentation. A short click turns a colored LED on, and another short click for off. But a long press of the e-switch switches between which colored LED is illuminated. Oddly enough, you can turn both the white LED and a colored one on at the same time. I found no sign of strobe/SOS modes (whew!).

Low Voltage Protection: Normally this would just be a footnote, but not this time. The B21 doesn’t seem to have any low-voltage protection. Thankfully, a protected cell will fit. And Brinyte actually included a “protected” cell with my sample. But it appears that the protection circuit failed to shut down at low voltages. So I’d recommend using a good protected cell. When I performed my first runtime test using the included cell, I finally gave up on waiting for the light to turn off. When I tested the cell, it was down to 2.48V. Not good.

Miscellaneous:

The tailcap has a piece sticking up to mount a lanyard to (not included), but it’s only on one side. That makes the switches easy to activate, but also means that you won’t be using the B21 as a candle.
Because of having an e-switch embedded in the tailcap, it must have a way to pass signals of some sort to the head of the light - it appears that the tube is double-layered to assist with this.
While I didn’t disassemble anything, I did notice that the tailcap spring appears to be thin steel (a magnet stuck to it) - it’s begging for a spring replacement. And while I can’t get to it, the front spring appears to be copper-ish (the tube is glued in place).
Regarding the size of the light, the head is a bit on the large side. Bigger than a B158, but small enough that it’s bezel can nest inside the bezel of the Convoy L2. It’s big enough that I wouldn’t carry this around all of the time, but it’s better than carrying around multiple lights if you know you’d need a combination of white and one or more of the colors. That said, I feel like a form factor similar to the MH27 might be a better solution if you want to include multiple colors and keep the size reasonable.

Output & Runtime: The output seems pretty good. The included cell seems to be slightly limiting of the output. At full power without any additional cooling, it takes approximately 75 minutes to reach 50% of output. Time to 10% is roughly 110 minutes. While I haven’t found any specs, I’d say output is roughly 1000 lumens. It’s almost exactly the same as my Convoy M1 with an XP-L V6 at 2.8A.

Beamshots: These are done at roughly 30 yards.

B21: High

B21: Low

Convoy C8 with XP-L HI V2 3C (left) vs Brinyte B21 (right)

B21: Red

B21: Green

Thank you to Brinyte for providing the light!

Brinyte2018 · 2018-05-14T08:49:51.000Z

Thanks for the wonderful review and suggestion, gchart. They are very helpful for us :+1:

desmondkun · 2018-05-14T12:37:31.000Z

Wow! A cat’s palm light.
Thanks for review.
What is that hole in the head for?

gchart · 2018-05-14T13:27:35.000Z

desmondkun:

Wow! A cat’s palm light.
Thanks for review.
What is that hole in the head for?

No problem! The holes are for set screws to hold the end of the head onto the base. With the “cat’s palm” shape (nice term for it!), you can’t exactly thread them together.