Whilst out walking my dog one night last week another dog walker came up to me & commented on how bright my light was (ThorfireC8s) & said that he had a really bright 2000lm zoomable light that was brilliant.
He showed me his light & it was marked up Ultrafire xml-t6.
He said that he had bought a few with batteries & chargers off ebay & they were superb ?
We had a brief discussion where I told him that he should be careful with the cells & chargers.
Anyway he brought the cells round to mine a couple of days ago as I had said that I could test the real power of the cells.
First cells were a pair of red/silver Ultrafires marked BRC 3000 mah
They felt extremely light so I weighed them at 27g each (way to light).
I put them in a Lii 500 & performed a charge/discharge/charge cycle.
Didn”t take long as one cell showed 378mah & the other 282 mah !
Next a pair of brown/gold labelled BRC 4000 mah.
These felt much heavier but were very different weights with one weighing 45g & the other 52g ?
Tested these & got 784 & 788 mah.
Third pair were Black/Gold labelled BRC 6000 mah.
They weighed 40g & 39g & gave 696 & 902 mah.
He was happily using these cells & thought that they were top notch & informed me that he normally charged them over night in his kitchen !
I explained to him about Ultrafires & that they were often reclaimed old laptop batteries or god knows what inside & that the mah values were massively over estimated.
I suggested that he should get some genuine cells & a reasonable charger & showed him a few of my chargers & cells but I don”t know if he will or not as he seemed pretty sceptical.
I would love to have been able to break open those 27g 3000 mah cells & seen what was inside.
I was at a flea market when I heard someone selling ultracrap zoomie light say how bright they were. He had ultrafire 18560s in a box and was explaining to someone how powerful Li-ion batteries are, comparing it to a AA light with a 5mm led in. The person then said that they had just bought a really bright ‘military grade’ flashlight on eBay and it cost a ton. How much do you want to get that it was a g700? He actually bought a couple 18650s and a AAA battery holder that the seller duped him into thinking would work in it.
In the box he had for the cheapo light, it advertised the led as a luxenon 3 watt light engine, but looking throught the lens, it was a latticebright XM-L clone. That’s funny, the wrong manufacturer is advertised but it’s a fake of the correct manufacturer.
LMAO, whoever is responsible for this is truly brilliant. That ad shows up on just about every website i go to, because I clicked on it once, actually from here. It’s just unfortunate for the people that get suckered in. I probably wouldn’t have known better if I didn’t belong to this forum.
Ultrafire BRC 
Those things seem to always be crap. More than anything else.
bella-headlight, good that you informed him! Not a lot more you can do then show and educate, what the subject is doing with it is his/her responsibility.
lightgecko, brr not a nice situation!
Yup, my first 18650’s were the brown/gold labelled BRC 4000 mah, 
then a pair of the lopsided weight red/silver Ultrafires. (heavier at one end - can’t be right).
I knew there was something up with them but i didn’t know what until i started investigating this, reading here.
People don’t want to believe they’ve bought crap and find it easier to delude themselves with the hype until directly shown the proof, even then you still can’t change the minds of a few.
It’s hard to not just walk up to those kind of sellers and in no uncertain terms explain the crap they’re selling people, but generally people don’t take too kindly to directly insulting their merchandise.
One time I tried to explain to a guy that he was selling flashlights with a cree XM-L instead of a luxeon C, but he wouldn’t have any of it. I was polite, and trying to help him advertise, but nope. He listened better after I produced my olight s10 and it put to shame a light 10 times it’s size.
I’m surprised your gear was able to display such low readings
Going by weights alone I would guess that the red/silver 3000 mah batteries weren”t 18650 cells at all & had some small cell wired inside them.
I guess the others were just very poor used lap top pulls ?
It is surprising (worrying) how poor a lap top pull these Chinese re-wrappers are willing to use as I have plenty of old lap top pulls that were originally 2600 mah that are still showing around 2200 mah.
God only knows what their criteria is for selecting which cells to re-use & which cells to discard.
That’s simple:
Put the pull into some cr*@pfire flashlight. If it lights up for 5 seconds the cell is considered marketable. That’s it! 