Please let us know your findings on the K3500.
Thanks
Dave
Ok, I received the light this afternoon. I played with it for about an hour and decided to do a run-time test that just now finished at 52 minutes. It flickered and I quickly shut it off. It got very warm during the test and I had to aim a fan at it. It may run a bit longer that 52 minutes because I was playing with it before I decided to do the test. I'll do another run-time test this weekend.
The finish is nice, the build quality seems to be fairly good, the lumen output is very good and it's comfortable to hold with it's slightly tri-sided handle. The insides of the light are clean without any dust behind the lens or machining materials in the threads or other places. I'm happily surprised that the reflector is less frosted than it appears in other pictures that I've seen. It's not smooth and polished like the AE's or X990 but it much more reflective than say.....a MOP reflector.
Throw is slightly better than I expected for this light, no doubt because of the decent properties of the reflector. The on-off switch is
way to light. It's maybe a half or a third of the pressure that I think it should be. I would not put this light anywhere that it could accidentally be switched on because it wouldn't take much at all. This is a fairly bad fault as far as I'm concerned. The focus range is small but does give the user a setting preference which is nice. I probably won't be adjusting it in and out during use, but I've already set it to the shape of beam that I like. So, from this aspect the focus is actually nice and everything locks down tight after setting.
It's not as bright as the X990, as predicted but is brighter than the AE PL24/S or Xenide 25W. I'm going to rough guess it about about 2800 lumens, but honestly it's hard to tell. Lets just say that the X990 is quite noticably brighter and with much better color rendition. Yes, it is very blue, so blue that it's my bluest HID. The charger stand is silly along with the plug that plugs into it. It's so lose that it keeps popping out by itself because of subtle twist tension in the cord that plugs into the base. A car charger with this design would be idiocy because it would never charge while driving.
My three favorite things so far:
Very good output.
Great size and is comfortable in my hand.
Adjustable focus that is most useful as a user preset.
My three most disliked features:
Very blue beam.
On-off switch pressure is far to weak for a high power HID.
Silly charging base, loose charging plug, heavy built-into handle batteries.
:thumbsdow
I googled g&p35w hid and got a few hits, there's one on eBay for $230.
