Thanks for the info. If true, that makes them liars. One more reason to stay away from them if you so choose.
I believe their lights, construction wise, should be and are tougher. However, it hasn't been determined whether they are CONSISTENTLY as impact and water resistant TO THE DEGREE AT advertises. I'm personally turned off by their persistent exaggeration of output, throw, and runtime performance. The out of box reliability of their lights is also a gamble. I'm therefore not a bit surprised that AT doesn't have a bigger share of the market.
To those who still willingly choose AT, I simply try to help them along. If they get a light they're happy with, great. If they don't, then that's fewer that will buy AT in the future. It's a win-win situation.
I bought an Armytek Predator Pro as one of my first 'high end lights'. It no longer gets used. Not only was I mislead about where they are made, my personal experience (and MANY others' it seems) with their warranty/product support is absolutely pathetic.
I didn't initially know but the PP I purchased came with the lens installed backwards and as such, a simple wipe of the lens with a soft cotton cloth rendered many clearly visable scratches on the exposed surface. From my initial Lux tests, about 10-15% was lost over the initial numbers due to what is the equivalent of 'lens fogging' albeit permanent due to actually scratching up the AR coating which should have been facing the emitter not the user.
I contacted AT after I worked out what was going on (removed lens, wiped other side and no more scratches appeared, wiped originally exposed side some more and low and behold, further scratching occurred) which was about a month after receiving it and was basically abused and called an idiot for wiping the AR coated side.......ahhhh well, had you not sent it out with the wrong side exposed it wouldn't have happened....they basically said I should have been able to tell that the AR coating was facing the wrong way, flipped it and called it a day. I asked how exactly a user is to know without obvious signs like scratching and received no further response despite resending the email another two times over the course of a few weeks. Get stuffed if you call that customer service!!!
It has also been long established that AT are straight up trying to scam/mislead consumers based on their CANADIAN MANUFACTURER claims. They have absolutely no production done anywhere but China. No matter how many times they are called out on this, they refuse to change their wording so for me that is the 1st reason not to buy from them as a new user - I just wish I knew this before looking into whether or not others had issues.
It seems to read like this: customer A has a great experience or customer B has a terrible experience so flip a coin, you might get lucky but I'd never take my chances again.
Then you have the outright dangerous operation of the new high powered models. Seems they just had to one-up everyone else and make a headlamp that produced an absolutely insane output but neglected simple safety features like functional thermal management like Zebralight. So so many users have reported their XHP-50 headlamps getting to near scalding temperature before THEY THEMSELVES shut it down as the light simply doesn't do what it is supposed to..
Not really surprising as they couldn't even get the lesser powered headlamps working for a number of years (did they ever!?!) as I read numerous reports of users receiving defective models in their infancy only to send them back and literally wait months and months - some over a year - with no light, no communication and no refund.
At the end of the day, anybody foolish enough to know all of this and still buy (DO YOU LIKE GAMBLING???) an AT really has money to burn if you ask me. It's kinda like throwing your money out the window of your car at a busy intersection and hoping to find it in a weeks time. No thanks...