XTAR MX4 Review

If you want your images to be inline, you should upload them to an image hosting site instead of mega.nz
I use https://imgbb.com/, but there are many other free image hosting sites.
With imgbb, it’s best if you create an account first. :+1:

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You can also just upload them directly to BLF if you downscale the resolution a bit.

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Are my links not working? Mega is a legitimate file sharing site

I haven’t found a good way to do that. It’s too bad. I understand wanting to save server space, but we left behind 3mp cameras a while ago. 1mb is really small. I wasn’t expecting it. Imgur seems to be more about making memes. Photoshop is gone. I’m not looking at paying a fee just to upload photos. The forum should have that build in. Hopefully people don’t mind just clicking the link

thanks for the review, congrats on your new kit,
appreciated your comments about 1.5V LiIon being useful for incan lights

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If you drag the photo from your desktop directly into the text editing box it uploads the image automatically to blf’s servers. The image quality on BLF is fine for use in 2024

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The problem is that one megabyte is as large as the file can be. I did try dragging pictures directly into the text box. I did try dragging pictures directly into the text box. I was given a pop-up that the file size was too big. All of my pictures are bigger than that because I’m using a modern camera. That was all I meant.

Thank you, John

A resizing is extremely quick. There are a myriad of free options both offline and online that will allow you to resize photos at acceptable quality and no cost to you but a few seconds of your time.

I’m only making a point of this because seeing a forum review with hyperlinks to a filesharing site in place of images is likely to turn most people to click off your review almost immediately. So it would be a shame for your hard work to go overlooked due to this relatively minor issue of a 1mb file limit.

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You were right. It was a bit of a pain to read. The sizing isn’t perfect. But it’s better now. Took a few tries to get an app that worked. Thanks

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IrfanView for Windows is a pretty good app for resizing. You can press B for Batch editing, add a folder, resize all, save to a new folder.

I reduce the size of my photos to 800x600 pixels roughly because the bandwidth used is pretty high on my site with compressed and cached files.

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Yeah, I usually use IrfanView for cropping and resizing images.
The only common thing it doesn’t do is save webp images with a transparent background.
For that, I use GIMP.
And for more advanced operations, I use PhotoShop.

By the way, you can upload images up to 32MiB in size with imgbb, though that won’t be very helpful to those with a slow internet connection, so resizing images is a better solution. :grin:

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FastStone Photo Resizer is free and it is very good program.

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I did the review on an iPad. So I’m stuck with whatever’s available there. This worked all right

Thank you for review :slight_smile:

But for me this much to simple charger is not worth a buy.

I wish Xtar would add features which is standard at most competitors

You’re welcome. It is definitely missing some features. That’s kind of the point. But obviously it is doesn’t work for you, it’s not for you

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Never understand Xtars philosophy in many cases, charger which supported so many chemistries is mostly interesting for non-standard-users, not for ppl who buy cells in discounters :wink:

So I hope a bit for a new Xtar charger, at least they include the features I mentioned in this topic

Thanks for the review. Shows on AliExpress for about £14 before tax/shipping, this isn’t too bad, I might pick one up if a few more good reviews come out and they go on sale.

This looks like a very simple charger- the default charging current is quite low (500mA) but that should help battery longevity and also is more appropriate for smaller cells. I do wonder if they could have chosen 750ma, and said 10440 cells are not compatible…

The box says NiMh is 0.5A, I assume this is even with only 2 cells in the outer slots?

I’d be interested to see the NiMh charging performance, given multi-chemistry chargers often struggle.

Also of interest, would be stability on voltage brown-out conditions, there’s a possibility that this would make an excellent USB Solar Panel charger.

I asked my contact there and she confirmed they do use minus Delta charging. Here is the answer to my question.

Hi Victor,

For charging NIMH batteries, MX4 adopts pulse charging, and enable 0ΔV/-ΔV termination plus the CVSA tech (NiMH Charging voltage slope analysis), and other multiple schemes to intelligently determine when the batteries get fully charged. These charge algorithms ensure faster charging, higher accuracy of full-charge detection, and lower battery temperatures on NIMH batteries. Besides, the charger has multiple protections, such as reverse polarity protection, Over-current protection, Over-voltage protection, over-charge protectioin, Short-circuit protection, overtime charging protection…

And yes, you are correct, NIMH batteries only get 500 mA per slot regardless how many is used or which slot

As far as your usage with brownouts, I’m not sure. It does not have its own internal battery or anything, so I presume it’s going to follow how well your incoming voltages. So you may want to run your solar panel through some type of small power bank or UPS