I posted a long time ago questioning why you were testing these cheap cells. I now realise that I was wrong to do this and it is important that these batteries are tested to verify that they are no good for the people that dont know about these batteries. I hope you can except my apology and thank you for the very time consuming excellent work that you do here and other places.
Fake Ultrafire is an oxymoron.
Of course I will accept your apology, but it is not really needed, you are entitled to your opinion (I am glad that you now can see it the same way as me).
Thanks HKJ.
Thanks.
For those greatly underestimating the popularity of Ultrafire, check out these sellers in developed countries, and I carefully chose them not to be from China.
Large pack, 10pcs per listing, 560 sold, total 5600pcs UltraFire sold.
AC charger, 4pcs per listing, 831 sold, total 3324 UltraFire sold.
USA, 8pcs per listing, 1738 sold, total 13904 UltraFire sold
USA, 10pcs per listing, 1237 sold, total 12370 UltraFire sold.
One appeal to you, HKJ:
Many people can’t read those graphs and a short conclusion like you give here isn’t illustrative enough, I think.
It would be nice if you could enhance the conclusion only a bit - why is the performance bad and why does the cell have no protection circuit?
I know why, but I think the most people just look at the photos and the conclusion.
As Hikelite pointed out the UF batteries and chargers are popular. They LOOK just like any other Li-on, have BETTER (but fake) specs, and the average person has no way to test them. I’d warrant over half the people in this forum don’t have a way to quantifiable test them. They use them, they work WAY better than (the probably lousy) NiMh they also own and don’t know how to charge/take care of, so they are very very happy. All you have to do is read positive report after report from purchasers. The vast majority of the reports have no data to support functional claims at all.
I agree with L4M4-a slightly more expanded conclusion would be useful for folks not able to read you graphs, as excellent as they are.
I do try to makes these reviews as easy as possible for me and let my test stations do most of the work, that is one reason I have been able to run them for about 3 years and hopefully will be able to run them longer.
I do often put a little bit of explanation between the charts and I do not like to repeat that in the conclusion and then there are a couple of other articles on my website (They can also be found on BLF) with a bit more explanation.
With the protection there are two details that gives it away:
1) The protection test does not stop, but goes all the way to 15A, i.e. the battery will deliver 15A without tripping any protection.
2) The physical look of the battery: http://lygte-info.dk/info/isMyBatteryProtected%20UK.html
As far as capacity goes. Be educational to the uninformed to provide a graph line in bold black for what the theoretical discharge curve at say 2 or 5 amps would be if the battery met the listed capacity claim. This battery is about 1/3 of the claimed capacity. That or actual run time with the test battery in a specified light versus what it would be if the battery met it’s capacity specification in the same light.
I have seen some flashlights on Amazon rated poorly by some reviewers who down rated THE LIGHT due to very poor run time rather than blaming the poor batteries they are feeding it.
Thanks for posting this, its always good to have solid data to backup ones position that ultrafire cells are junk
I think the reviews are plenty adequate the way they are. Adding more detailed conclusions is a bottomless pit. Adding extra “ideal” lines to graphs is potentially very misleading, both for bad cells and good cells.
Good/bad is binary and easy to understand. The conclusion is entirely straightforward: it indicates “very bad” performance and “lies.” What more does a consumer need to know?