Yup. Comes with a cigar grip ring that fits it perfectly. Still on the fence about that bit, and I usually like a light with pocket clip, but overall, I can’t complain. It does what I need, which is to put out a relatively clean and very warm beam of light.
Not glamorous by any stretch. Sofirn LT1S w/Sofirn 5000AH 21700, Wurkkos TS10 Ti (4000K) w/Vapcell L10 flat-top, Sofirn IF25A (4000K) w/Vapcell G50 5000Ah 21700, topped with my funky home brewed diffuser. All stock. Honorable mention to my 12 year old companion in the upper left corner of the shot, Malkoff MDC HA loaded with SF CR123A.
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There’s a video comparison somewhere here made I think by a user called chicken drumstick, I ended up buying one with a 3.7V xenon dropin from kaidomain because of it! The host is nicely made, quite shiny anodising, slightly sharp & chunky. Probably a good idea to use a protected battery with it as there isn’t any driver or anything, so no LVP
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Pill bottle diffuser?! I do that too! The white cap thing on top is genius! Off to look for one now!
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I don’t have pics right now, but…
- Emisar DA1K w/ NTG50 4200K, throwy optic + DC-Fix. Red host, white button, black bezel+ring, clip. Makes a nearly perfect general-purpose beam with great beam color and beam shape.
- Emisar D4K boost w/ 519A 5700K dedomed. Red host, white button, black bezel+ring, clip. Also a great general-purpose beam, a little warmer and more floody, with a pretty hotspot+starburst pattern.
- Emisar DW3AA w/ 519A 5700K dedomed. Red host, old ZebraLight H5 headband. Very nice headlamp with a fantastic beam.
I had been mostly using the D4K, because it’s generally fantastic… but the ~4000K beam looks a bit golden instead of pure neutral, and I wanted to try the NTG50 4200K emitter. So I got a DA1K and both of its optics (floody + throwy).
The NTG50 had an awesome beam color, but the beam shape wasn’t great with either of the optics. The floody optic was too floody and had a bit of a donut hole in the middle… while the throwy optic was too narrow and had a 4-leaf-clover style beam shape. So I put some DC-Fix on the lens with the throwy optic inside, and now it looks basically perfect.
The DW3AA replaced my Emisar D2 as my main headlamp, for a couple reasons:
- My D2 is extremely picky about which cells it can use, and I have only one battery which can physically fit in it. Meanwhile, the DW3AA will happily use almost anything, including Eneloops, which I have dozens of.
- My D2 has a colder beam than I was hoping, while this DW3AA has a nicer color.
- While it’s really neat that my D2 can be throwy or floody (my other LED is an Osram W1), I almost never need the throwy mode in a headlamp. I don’t really need the second channel.
Otherwise, I like the D2 form factor and concept more. But the battery fit issue makes it hard to use, and I picked the wrong primary/flood LED while configuring it. I hope someday Hank might make a version which can take pretty much any AA or 14500 cell. Perhaps an even smaller version with 1 channel instead of 2.
Anyway, mostly using a DA1K lately. I really like the NTG50 emitter.
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If you end up ordering another dw3aa, I can confidently recommend a blend of 519a’s with: 5700k, 5000k, and the final led can be 4500k or 4000k(which is what I happen to have.) Since the wash tends to take the tint of whatever the warmest LED is, it ends up being pretty warm, so if you like more neutral warm, then I’d recommend going for the 5700k/5000k/4500k blend instead. All standard domes.
3500k, blended, cool white m60 dropin
3500k vs blended
White wall
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I’ve done tint mixing a bunch of times. For example, I have a Noctigon M44 with adjustable blend between 519A 2700K and 519A 5700K. And I have a KR4 with 219B 3500K and 219B 4500K. I even use a mixed warm+cool bulbs in the bathroom, so I can see subtle color shades better while doing makeup. But I would not want a DW3AA with 4500+5000+5700K 519A emitters. Here’s why:
- I don’t find mixed emitters work very well in a triple like this. I reserve tint mixing for quads or larger.
- With the dome off, the CCT would be too warm for me. Even 5700K by itself (519A dedomed) is very slightly warmer than I’d like.
- With the dome on, I find 519A is too floody for these little optics.
- Mixed dome and dedome blends produce circular rainbow effects in the beam since they don’t focus the same way, so I do them all one way for color consistency.
- With the dome on, the CCT would be colder than I want, and the duv would be too high. With a neutral duv emitter like 519A, the CCTs need to be pretty far apart to pull the duv down to a comfortable place. Like, 2700K+5700K makes a decent 4200K tint… but 4000K+4500K makes a beam which is much more green. And though I may like green in my hair, I don’t want it in my torch beam.
- Including a middle tint between the warm and cool endpoints… pulls up the duv and makes the beam more green.
The ANSI white color space is curved, but mixed LEDs blend along a straight line. So to get a lower duv at neutral color temperatures, I pick LED CCTs which are far apart. For example, I have a dual-channel D4Sv2 with Cree 1A+8A tints, and the pink line here shows the range of blends it can produce. The circled area is the approximate range of tints I find agreeable (ish):
That 1A+8A light may only have ~70 CRI, but the beam looks amazing. It makes every other light look green in comparison. So it’s one of my favorites.
A similar style of mixing is also a big part of why adjustable Viltrox panels look so good. The VL-300T and L116T make fantastic lamps or task lights.
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I can assure you there’s no green in this blend, lol…I really have to get myself an Opple.
We’re talking about different things.
At a neutral white CCT like ~4000K, a duv of zero tends to look green. I’m not aiming for zero duv, I want at least -5 mduv or ideally more like -10 mduv… like what the thumbs-up and pink line show on the chart I posted.
The dotted “BBL” line is zero duv, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily looks good. I have some domed neutral white 519A LEDs, and they probably look great on an Opple because they’re high CRI with neutral CCT and pretty close to zero duv… but to me they look green.
To get a neutral white 519A beam I like, I have to either blend CCTs which are at opposite ends of the white spectrum to get the “pink line effect”, or dedome a cool white model.
Emisar D1 (came with a GT FC40, now has 4000K XHP35.2 Hi) it sits by the bed. Moonlight on the ceiling doesn’t wake the wife up when I go to bed late. It’s used every night.
Convoy Z1 (5000K SFT25R) is often used in the backyard, or a KDLitker E6 with an XP50 drop in. The Z1 is great for spotting Flying Foxes (massive fruit bats) at night. They roost in trees about 75m from our yard.
I see. I’m waiting on Boaz’s zircon filters to get here, I’ll see if I can notice a substantial drop in green. In the particular photos I posted, does the blended option look green? It’s as close to what I see with my own eyes as I can get it, albeit dimmed for more accurate color rendition.
Due to the nature of digital photos, I can’t really tell what the tint is from just the picture. It shows me approximately how you see it, since you adjusted the white balance to make it look how you see it… but that may not match how I’d see the same light IRL.
So I’ll answer by showing you how a couple LEDs look to me. On the left is a NTG50 4200K, and on the right is a 519A 5000K with dome. The photo is taken straight from my camera, only cropped and resized.
But if you saw the same two lights in person, you might think the 519A looks white instead of green, and you might think the NTG50 looks pink instead of white. Different people see differently.
This came up recently in Hank’s thread too:
Edit: I tried the same pic but with a different 519A 5000K, and got very different results. The pic above was a Wurkkos TS10Max with 519A 5000K. The pic below shows an Emisar D4K with 519A 5000K (on the right).
This is more what I’d expect from a 4200K LED next to a 5000K LED. When white balanced for the 4200K light, the 5000K light looks blue.
The earlier pic with the green light tells me there’s something pretty different about the LEDs or optics Wurkkos used. The two 519A lights are both “5000K” but they look wildly different.
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In the first photo, the left looks white, and the right looks greenish.
In the second photo, the left still looks the same white, but the right looks blue with a hint of green…
Just sent you a dm…
I get what you’re saying, depending on what a person sees at any given moment, the colors and tinting might not be readily apparent because of whatever the eyes may have been relatively conditioned to see. The brain is a funny thing…
***P.s. It’s why I lock my AWB to 5000k, it gives a somewhat objective metric in light color comparisons. Realistically I should lock it to 5200K, more akin to sunlight, but then all the oranges and yellows get blown out of proportion…
Also, typically, I refrain from comparing light colors right away. I’l turn on the new light in the same conditions as I would another light, i.e. in the dark at the same wall and room, and usually the first impression as compared to what I REMEMBER the other light being like will give me a good baseline of how much I will like the light. I’ll use it for a bit to get my eyes accustomed to the color temperature, then turn it off and close my eyes to take a few minutes to compare my memories of the two. I then imagine how they would look side by side. Then, I turn them both on at the same time and open my eyes.
In my mind, I typically idealize what they would look like, taking into account any strange tinting I noticed. If I see NO tinting, then it was just my brain playing tricks on me. If the tinting does show up, then I know my eyes were working properly at that time. I recently received a second D3aa with 5700k, and cold bored a beamshot, and it looks like a cool gray to me, like a dystopian mechanical bluish gray, except with high CRI. In my mind, I compared it to my blended tint one, and it still looked the same way, with the blended being a much warmer “white” with a tiny tiny tiny hint of rosiness. When I turned them both on, it was exactly what I saw, then I imagined the 5700k compared against a noon day sun, and it would appear slightly bluer without the grayness…and that’s exactly what it looked like. Sunlight is a weird thing though, at high noon, it looks yellow but is actually 5000k/5100k…
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Man! There are some great lights in this thread! Someone should start a forum !!!
Edc is the forlorn Fenix E16 with 519a, 4500k, dedomed.
Favorite torch of all, Jetbeam TCR1 with a old, but wonderful XM-L2 , 3k, Hi~CRI.
Lumintop FW1A, 6500 XPL , for searching for Ninja in the backyard tree line and tree tops 
And walking two golden retrievers❤️
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Glad youre enjoying your Headlamp
you might like the similarity to the upcoming Wurkkos HD03, which also offers spot and flood beams, plus Aux.
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Does it have a dial though? :-)
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If only the olight clip had a snagless dial, the current one still has a somewhat snaggable dial. Loose threads, errant fiber, that kind of thing
I really only use two lights these days.
Emisar D3AA is my edc light. I love the general efficiency, and it’s enough light for anything I need to do generally speaking. It’s small enough I can carry it however I’m dressed.
Emisar D1K with SFT-25. I live in the country, and the D3AA just doesn’t get it done after dark when what I want to look at is a few hundred feet away.
Between the two of them I can cover 99% of my needs, and on the rare occasion they don’t I can find something around my house that will take care of it!
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Wowtac W1, Energizer Hybrid headlamp, Sofirn HS10.
if lasers can count, too…a generic green pointer
for astronomy education.
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