Got mine today. It has "AAA-P" engraved near the front of the battery tube, but only the "AAA" has the white stuff in the engraving so the -P is fairly hard to see and you have to look carefully for it. Pretty cool. The knurling is a bit rougher than my old-style AAA (Arc LLC AAA-S, 3 lumens).
The LED comes a little closer to the front of the bezel than my AAA-S led did, similar to the brand P "Annameria Dallasandra" that I
reviewed a while back. I guess this is due to the LED itself being differently shaped than the Nichia led. At the time of that review I figured it was because brand P was using different electronics. The AAA-Snow has more beam artifacts than the AAA-S maybe because of this. Largish hotspot with narrow but bright corona, not much spill after that, with a few weird rings. I'm fine with that.
I know this light is not about brightness but nonetheless, comparisons are irresistable. The AAA-Snow on a NiMH cell completely blows away my AAA-S in total output, hotspot brightness, corona brightness, and tint. The AAA-S beam also looks horrible (blue) by comparison even though its spill is smoother. Somewhat interestingly, the AAA-Snow also seems to be slightly beating my 3-led(!) brand P ultra-power Matterhorn (old style, I think with "snow23" leds) in output (wall bounce test) even though the 3-led unit supposedly runs at around 2x the total power. This may be because of the NiMH cells used in both of them. The Matterhorn's circuit is known to be less regulated than Arc's, i.e. output varies more with the input voltage. So the Matterhorn likely runs brighter with an L92 lithium AAA cell. I try to reserve those cells for special applications and so would normally run this type of light on a NiMH, therefore I'll stick with the NiMH comparison.
I do worry a little about the snow led's longevity at this high overdrive (I felt even the 3-led Matterhorn was pushing things at 35 mA per led, and the AAA-Snow is supposedly running 45 mA). TIN, is your measurement setup repeatable enough that you can do a new fresh-battery measurement on your AAA-Snow and compare it with the first such measurement you took, before your runtime tests? It's possible that the snow led has detectable fading already. FWIW, my 3-led Matterhorn has run maybe 20 hours or so (went through one L92 and an alkaline or two, plus a few NiMH cycles, plus a lot of shelf duty), so it might also have some fade.
Update: As measured with my DMM's 10A scale, the AAA-snow is drawing about 0.19 amps, but the 3-led matterhorn is drawing just 0.11 amps or so. The AAA-S draws about 0.17 amps. This is all with the same Titanium 1000mAH NiMH cell with 1.289V open circuit voltage, i.e. fairly well charged but not hot off the charger (in fact I charged it about 2 weeks ago). So I guess the 3-led light is running a bit more efficiently than the overdriven Arc.
Update 2: On a somewhat used L91 AA lithium cell (1.694 OC voltage) the Matterhorn uses around 370 mA(!). That's a kludgy bench measurement with the battery outside the light, i.e. I can't easily do a brightness comparison. I may break down and put a new L92 cell into the Matterhorn just to see. The AAA-Snow and AAA-S on the L91 use 0.22 and 0.20 amps respectively.
Of course the AAA-snow is much brighter than the Annameria Dallasandra which runs at a much lower power level (my review includes a 5+ day nonstop runtime test). It's also 1.5-2x brighter than my Kilimanjaro HP which also runs at a lower power level. The Kilimanjaro also has a smaller hotspot and smoother beam, I guess because of its bigger reflector. The AAA-snow and the Annameria Dallasandra are maybe a good pair since they could be seen as high and low powered versions of the same light. I'm not that crazy about the Kilimanjaro which has that kludgy screw-in lanyard post. The old AAA-S and the 3-led Matterhorn just seem obsolete
. I don't have an AAA-CS to compare right now but I had one recently, and I think its total output is about the same as the Snow, but its beam may have been cleaner (except for the color). A DS comparison would be interesting but I'm spending way too much on these lights so I think I'll keep deferring a purchase.
Anyway this is a really qualitative improvement over the old AAA-S, a much nicer light because of its color rendition as well as output.