AnAppleSnail
Flashlight Enthusiast
I'm on mobile internet, so I'll take a brief look. It's often quite hard to tell who owns a company. The company that makes most of your car's filters had its main domestic factory sold sixteen times in the past two decades. Did you know?
Anyway, my point about baldly lying about product specs stands. If someone is willing to lie so poorly, where they're sure to be caught, who knows what else they are lying about? It's my opinion that stating misleading specifications is lying. If I claim that a flashlight I sell emits 1000 lumen, I'd better have measurements of this lamp performing as claimed, or at least reasonable models (IE, driven at xx amps (ww lumen) for yy minutes, with zz optical losses). If I am just citing the maximum rated output from Cree's datasheets, I am lying about my flashlight.
While I wait for much of their site to load, I'll talk through some questions I'd want answered here.
Something that's common with a new manufacturer (As opposed to cloneshops) is to have a distinct look across all their products. Witness Zebralight and Quark's debut lines: A true signature (Olive anodize, floody beam patterns, chunky fins, rounded and sleek, unified user interface common to all products), or (Semigloss black, good knurling, impressively unified modes) is a sign of a real company doing real design and development. Do we see this with the company? Common look, UI, design philosophy?
Another common thing is, who are the vendors? Zebralight sells their own kit and ships from a real address, and they have vendors. FourSevens has vendors in Atlanta for my part of the US, and so on. Solarforce has vendors - even though they're clearly not doing anything truly new, they do it well and for a good price. What vendors work with BrightMedic?
I look for branding. SunWayMan had some branding changes early on, but they have those hallmarks I mentioned: Branding, styling, vendors. The name may mean something to someone. What is the BrightMedic branding?
Style: I'm looking at the BrightMedic 'About Us' page. It's crap. Seriously, I've made up better flashlight drama to explain to a ten-year-old why I always have flashlights. Really, what EMS person doesn't have a flashlight, today? Even if it's a crap light, in their situation there are light switches. And I'm not sold on the utility of a focused aspheric for medical procedures, as they mention.
Vendors: Amazon, and themselves. But only for some products. That doesn't tell me much, but it also doesn't tell me anything very good. Warranty-wise, they give a 45-day moneyback guarantee, but I haven't found much beyond that (Aside from the mandatory US warranties which are tricky to enforce). Their legal paperwork is fairly put-together from what I can see.
Branding: Each of their products looks VERY MUCH like existing products. Each acts like a generic LED-from-hell light with high/Medium/annoying strobe. The only light that doesn't look like stuff from Two-Year-Ago-DealExtreme is the clone of a two-year-old headlamp, or another-****-HID-light cloned from HIDCountry and beyond. If they really are a manufacturer of quality, they're sure trying hard to hide it.
The product specs are... ugh. It'd be like a candy maker promising that chocolate helps children grow. Clearly-false product claims absolutely stand against the manufacturer. They indicate a lack of reliability, a shortage of honesty and passion for quality, and just tell me to spend money anywhere else. The brightest 1xAA flashlight can almost manage 200 lumens -- with no optical losses. Theirs may produce 100. If their claims are 200% bogus, why buy their gear?
I could continue, but it'll be more of the same.
Branding: None. There aren't even corporate colors or styles.
Vendors: Almost none. Even I can sell merch on Amazon. They do seem to ship from the US, but that says nothing about where the gear is made.
Style: None. They're clear copies of old copies.
Honesty: You've seen their specs. Ugh.
Edit: To summarize, their gear probably works. You can't help but get a usable amount of light out of LEDs these days. But I don't see anything that urges me to either believe any of their product claims OR to give them any money. An American shipping address does nothing to change my conviction that these are turned out a dime a dozen (And possibly of questionable legal origin) overseas. The product line isn't some brave inventor's brainchild. It's copies of copies that work, with lies papered over the middling real performance.
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