oh now I understand how you use it, put in batteries, tap for less than one second, so it goes into medium, turn it off immediately and when you need it you just tap it on for less than a second, but that will advance the stored mode, so it comes on high next time. yeah I can see how 100 lumens instead of 10 would be annoying...
I think I figured out why it works like this. So with the 1AA, available power is very restricted, that's why it doesn't have reverse polarity protection. In most flashlights with electronic mode switching you turn the light off for a given period of time to advance modes. For example you have it on med, turned on, you turn it off briefly, it will come on high. If you turn it off longer, it will come on med again. That means that the flashlight knows how long was it turned off, meaning the driver was actively monitoring the state of the light, hence consuming power. With the MDC, it only reads/writes the memory when the light is turned on, so if it's turned on for less then a second, it reads the mode from memory, turns on at that mode, and then writes the next mode in to memory. If it's left on, it will write default mode ( lowlow ) into memory, without checking the last stored mode. This way you don't need to run a timer when the light is "off", meaning it's not giving light, you only energize the brain of the light when it's on. But that's just my theory, someone would need to check parasitic drain and whatnot to confirm, but that's what I figured could be the explanation behind the mode-switching algorithm.
