Now that I’ve had the P18 for a day, here are my initial impressions:
- Hand feel - Feels well-built, with an intimidating look. Clip is fairly strong. Grip with clip is excellent. Without clip it is good, but not great. The ridges help with grip but are more slippery than knurling.
- Good heatsinking - entire body heats up simultaneously and light seems to hold maximum output for quite awhile.
- Fairly heavy and chunky. Similar to a Zebralight SC600 in size, though flatter.
- Clean beam with cool-white tint.
- UI is ok, but not great. It hits all the basics with shortcuts to moonlight, turbo and off. That’s great. Unfortunately, nothing about the UI is particularly fast or easy to use. The main button at the back is fairly stiff and feels a little awkward next to the endcap.
- No lockout - Chance of accidental activation is fairly low due to the stiff buttons. However, if used for pocket EDC I think there is still a small risk: I do not think the light will go to permanently “on” mode in the pocket since that requires a full press of the 2-stage switch, which is highly unlikely to occur. But I think an accidental half press and hold is possible. This would be a situation where your pants flexes around the light and maybe depresses the rear switch 2mm while your leg is bent. A half-press would activate last memorized mode and it would stay activated as long as the light is half-pressed. If that is turbo you would get 1800 lumens… which might be enough to burn a hole in a pocket.
- Red LED is nice, but you have to hold the button for 2 seconds to turn on. I’d have preferred instant on. I like that both LEDs can be used simultaneously. The red LED can be used to warm up and improve the color temperature of the beam when run simultaneously with the main LED on low and medium modes.
- Not a fan of the 2-stage switch - First stage activates at approximately 2mm depression, with second stage at 4-5mm when button is fully depressed. The switch is silent with no click at either stage. It’s very easy to press the switch down to turn it off and not realize you didn’t press the button all the way. If this happens while you were in turbo, the light will cycle to low instead of off. And low is dim enough you might not notice that it’s not off.
- A charger would have been nice - I think this light would have benefited from having an internal charger. I think there’s enough room for one in the ridge on top of the light. Has a rugged tactical look.
- Clip - The clip on this light is screwed in and quite heavy duty. I found the tension on it much too strong to fit over my belt, but that can be adjusted with pliers. The shape of the light and high quality clip lens itself to belt carry. I successfully removed the clip by unscrewing the clip retraining screw. I had no problems and the clip removed cleanly without any damage to the light or the screw. The light still feels good without the clip attached.
CONCLUSION:
An interesting and unique light from Nitecore. They’re definitely getting experience with die-cast aluminum manufacturing. This light hits all the basics, but for a pocket EDC light there are better and cheaper alternatives (like the FW3A which is brighter, lighter weight, has a better UI and a cheaper price).