Price point is USD 119. It’s basically a taller SC600 with the same emitter as the SC700. They’re claiming a very different driver but we’ll have to wait and see (unless anyone here happens to have a pre-release version?). There’s some risk with going for a pre-release but I’m hoping this won’t be like the SC65C as they’ve been pretty slow and patient with this one.
Here’s what they say about the new driver:
What’s New: The SC70 comes with a groundbreaking Digital Light Regulation (DLR) that regulates the light output digitally, without any heat-generating current sensing resistors or MOSFETs that associated with traditional multi-mode flashlights. The DLR, along with our meticulously selected LEDs with extremely low thermal resistance and our proprietary unibody buried heatsinks, enables the SC70 to run cooler and with longer sustained high output.
It’s unclear to me how much better the driver can really be but perhaps it will be able to sustain higher lumens longer than a traditional driver. That would be cool. The product details page doesn’t call out gorilla glass like some of their products do, but it’s unclear whether that’s because they cut and pasted from the SC600 page or because them’s the facts.
I know a lot of people have lost the tint lottery in the past with ZL but I’m not quite that tint sensitive and my SC700D is pretty darn neutral, so I’ve already got my SC70 order in.
Driver is smaller size than SC700 yet having high output thus causing some restrictions in output/runtime as i saw people talking about it vs SC700. And this new components…
Anyhow it will be pocket friendly version of big brother.
Gonna get 2, one to swap FFL707 emitter with and other with Thefreeman 5050-7070 adapter and gonna try to install NTG50
I took the gamble and ordered last night. As long as it’s below .005 duv at 5000k it should be nice. I find negative duv at cooler cct not only ugly, but it also triggers migraines for me.
My SC700 doesn’t have the greatest tint but it’s far from the greenest light I have. The DUV on mine ranges from 0.002 to 0.007 and is mostly around 0.005. Moderately green but not in the 0.01+ range that some of my SFT25rs are in.
I get it though - if you really care about tint, 0.005 doesn’t cut it.
In a well designed driver the shunt accounts for less than 1% point of efficiency, this is close to negligible, it’s a bit higher in Zebralight drivers because they use higher resistance shunts/mosfet range switch, this is because they use the low precision integrated Op-Amp of the microcontroller instead of a high precision discrete one (commonly used). in the SC700 it’s about 1.6% point of efficiency, it’s still not that big and their new solution requiring each driver to be calibrated after LED installion sounds like much more trouble than it’s worth for a very small gain in efficiency.
I’m very sensitive to light, and that’s what triggers my migraines. I’m not saying flicker couldn’t do it, but the sun doesn’t flicker. I also don’t own anything with visible flicker, but a super rosy ffl emitter can put me down for a few days.
How about atmospheric effects - like the way stars “twinkle”? Might not be a noticeable effect, but just enough outside perception to still trigger migraines…
Not a scientist, so I dunno - but migraines should just go to hell!
Sorry to hear that. I had a series of them after a head & neck injury - I had no idea before that just how debilitating they are. Even though it took about 4 years of PT, I’m very blessed that I don’t have them anymore.
May you stay one step ahead of them when they come looking for you, and may your relief be swift if that catch you.
Interesting. Why would they go to all of this effort for negligible gains? Seems like kind of a risky move. I don’t know anything about George but maybe he’s just interested in exploring frontier driver technology. I’m trying to understand why he would bother if it was just to increase runtime by 1%.
I do hope for everyone’s sake that when he says they’re going to use “meticulously selected LEDs” it means we’ll see more neutral emitters in this light.
(if and when you get your hands on one) could you verify whether or not the newer electronics could be considered a more solid “solid-state” in terms of heavy or hard use, not only in terms of electrical demands but physical abuse as well?
Was a huge ZL fan 5+ years ago myself, my first thought about the SC70 was .. “wut? only 2200 lumens?”.
I’m well aware that turbo brightness isn’t everything but I expected more from a XHP 70.3 HI combined with ZL efficiency.
I believe it has been stated many times, and a fellow member has it as a tagline, that efficiency != efficacy (or vice versa).
Very few things are engineered to operate at maximum efficacy at peak efficiency. Max output means diminished efficiency, such as motors at max revs, furnaces at full burn, LED at full drive, batteries at max drain…
Zebralight shines in the efficiency department when operated in its more sustainable modes. The LED power:output curve will tell you in what range the LED operates most efficiently. In the same given form factor, any flashlight (or any given system) can only be as efficient as its least efficient component, a.k.a. the bottleneck. In this case, max turbo current draws and declining output efficiency seem to go against Zebralight’s design philosophy. In short, it’s like shopping for a Toyota Corolla and expecting Supra level performance…
Yes, but I have a SC600Fd Mk IV Plus here with a XHP 50.2 if memory serves correctly. It does 1800 lumens.
I expect more from an XHP 70.3 HI in 21700 form factor and I know from Hanklights that this size can do ~3000 lumens easily for an acceptable amount of time (the ~45 seconds that ZL usually does).
