****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is a fairly impressive light, with very good peak power for its size and relatively nice controls. I'm not entirely convinced that the display screen for selecting modes is the best way to do things on a flashlight, but it's an interesting idea and has some advantages.This is a device that is mainly built to deliver short, intense bursts of light while remaining compact and easy to carry around. I can see it being amazing as an auxiliary light for exploring caves or navigating the woods at night, but it's not going to be able to run for nearly as long as most modern flashlights, and its thermal limits on how long it can stay at full power are some of the tightest I've ever seen. Believe it or not, this thing manages to feel like someone pulled it out of a survival horror video game and into the real world, which is something I say both affectionately and with some concern.It's a bit strange to me that this thing is marketed as an "EDC" light, given how specialized it is for high-brightness, short-duration use. When I see "EDC", I usually assume this means "general-purpose", and I'm unconvinced that this is a general-purpose light. This will be coming with me on camping trips and hikes, but it just doesn't quite seem like the right thing to bring to work with me every day.Good bits:- Extremely powerful and easily-accessed two-mode turbo settings, giving a 3000-lumen narrow beam with a half-press and 6500-lumen flood with a full press. When you need a really bright burst of light, you can get it in about one second without having to think about it.- Quick access to the lowest-brightness mode as well by holding the main button at half-press.- Nice "safety" switch on the side, making it hard to accidentally turn the light on while keeping it very quick to access when you need it. Flipping it to the "safe" position instantly turns off the light, giving you a reliable way to do that.- Very solid construction with good thermal management. The considerable amount of heat this light generates on its higher settings is distributed quite evenly over the metal shell.- Active thermal control for the normal brightness settings does a good job of balancing brightness and temperature without being too distracting.- Reasonably even beam color. Nothing too impressive, but not distracting either.- Easy charging via USB-C, with good rate of charge.- Nice unambiguous access to the four normal brightness settings, allowing you to pick one using the display screen before you turn the light on.- Strobe mode is hard to activate by accident if you don't need it, but can be made readily available (replacing the turbo mode) if you do.Not-so-good bits:- Accessing the main settings is somewhat cumbersome, inevitably involving the dreaded "push one button multiple times to cycle through brightness levels" pattern that I so dislike. In this case, there are four brightness settings, which feels like too many. To be honest, I feel like they could have done very well with only one "normal" brightness level accessed by a full press of the main button, rather than four - had they done that, the light would have still had four total brightness modes (half-press low mode, main mode, and the half- and full-press turbo modes), and each setting would have been easily and immediately accessed with just one button action, providing no ambiguity or fiddliness. The way they ended up doing things does provide somewhat more utility in plenty of cases, I suppose, but I can't help but be disappointed by how close this light came to being a gem of sophisticated-but-effortless operation while still falling short of the mark.- Turbo modes have a very short time limit, remaining at full power for just 7 seconds before dropping back to a substantially lower brightness. Contrary to what you might expect, the lower 3000-lumen turbo mode has exactly the same time limit as the higher 6500-lumen one. The light does a good job of letting you know what the limits are by showing you a "stamina bar" type of thing on the screen, which drains while the light is on at full power, stays empty after it drops to reduced power, and recovers (at a speed depending on temperature) once the light is off. It all feels like something out of a video game, which is kind of fun, but also a bit silly.- While this light is capable of both narrow- and wide-angle illumination thanks to its independently-controlled center-and-ring LED arrangement, you as the user don't get much input into which emitters are active at a given time. In the lower modes, only the centers are active, and it's only the higher-power modes that enable the flood rings. This means that there is no low-power flood mode, which is somewhat disappointing. This doesn't really affect my overall rating of the light - and I can see plenty of cases where the way it works will be nice - but it does feel fairly specialized in a way that I wasn't expecting.- Runtime on a charge is okay, but nothing too impressive. It reports that it will last for about 48 hours on its lowest, 15-lumen setting, and things ramp off quite rapidly from there. I think you probably get only a couple dozen 7-second bursts on its highest turbo mode on a charge, and every single one of those noticeably reduces the voltage of the battery displayed on the screen. (While fiddling with it in the course of writing this review, the voltage has come down from about 4.2V (~100%) to 3.8V (~70%), which is way more than I expected.)I don't think this should be taken as too much of a criticism (and it won't affect my rating), since this is clearly a light optimized for compact size and peak power over all else, but I think it's worth noting. This is a light that needs to be recharged far more often than any other in my collection, and the lack of a swappable battery means that this can be a bigger hassle than many users might expect these days.All in all, I like this thing, but it's important to know what you're getting and make sure it lines up with your expectations. This is a good light, but also one of the last in my collection that I'd recommend to any random person without knowing what their needs are first.
