Yes I know I am late to the party, but I’ve had a Wurkkos WK40 (SN: WK22L191) for some time now and still have some thoughts about it.
I was hoping to possibly mod this lamp into a kind of muggle-compatible quad-channel lamp, but that probably won’t happen. Long story short: a bad buy.
The feel and handling is ok. The anodization feels kind of “greasy”. The wall thickness is ok, but I wouldn’t use the lamp in applications where robustness is important.
Tailstand is possible, but there is no roll-off protection.
The UI is quite intuitive, but lacks optimization at some points. The brightness can be adjusted with the rotary ring on the head, the lamp is switched on and off at the rear and the modes are switched through. The rotary ring has clean pressure points and engages perfectly. Unfortunately, it has some play and sounds metallic, as if it is dragging slightly somewhere.
The problem is that the rotary ring only does what it is supposed to do sporadically. It “hangs” again and again. I turn the ring, but nothing happens. Skipping steps usually doesn’t work at all. Either the light stays on the previous level or it only switches one level further. This happens particularly frequently from T to M or from L to H.
I have no idea why this happens. The lamp is hardly usable as it is, especially as the effect occurs randomly. Of course, the problem does not occur with very slow operation, but this is still not correct, especially as other lamps such as the Nitecore SRT7 have exactly no problem at all with fast operation.
When switching on, it takes about half a second for the light to appear at all. The same delay also occurs when switching through the light modes. I constantly have the feeling that the light is not working properly or is somehow “stuck”. As pressing the tail switch quickly activates the strobe, it is also not possible to switch through the color modes quickly. Why? This must be noticeable during development! Just leave the strobe stuff out or make an extra grid next to Turbo for it!
For the LEDs, only the Luminus/Sanan product range is used. This goes hand in hand with the typical Luminus “vomit green” of the white SST-20 used here. Only on Turbo does the white light no longer appear extra-green, but the greenish tint is always visible. The red is not photo/ or deep red, but peaks at 620 nm, which is rather suboptimal for night vision applications.
Due to the different sizes of the LES of the color LEDs, the mixing of the colors is not good. In red+green mode, there is a clearly visible red ring around a light green spot. Why not simply use a textured or frosted lens (like the Ledlenser P7QC)? Here too, something like this must be noticeable during development!
The front glass is not AR coated. In this price range, this is already used by other manufacturers. Why this decision?
As for the rest: the supplied battery seems to be ok. USB charging function does what it should. There is a small charging status LED next to the socket, which lights up for a few seconds after switching on. Why not permanently? Nobody knows…
The bezel can be unscrewed without any problems. I was able to place a DC Fix foil in front of the lens. But be careful - the bezel can no longer be closed completely, there is a small gap as the whole construction is very tight and let no room for anything between lens and glass.
Let’s hope that the successor performs better. The idea is cool, but the implementation is not… I am not surprised the WK40 wasn’t the greatest success as it seems since it was in mass production for only a short time.