MX25L3 Questions

[Mr. Tone]

According to Eagletac's website the kit version should have included the holster. Here is a link to the spec. page where you will see this.
http://eagletac.com/html/mx25l3/specs.html
I would contact the dealer you got it from and they should get you taken care of.

 

[Photogr]

I got my MX25L3 earlier this week and while I haven't been able to use it for its intended purpose I still have several first impressions to report. If you haven't read all the posts in this or my other threads, you know that this is the first flashlight I've owned since my incandescent Maglite, so don't expect much in the form of a review. Just my impressions and a couple questions.

drpower, mine did come with the holster, which I think is just OK. It uses a formed nylon covered cardboard(?) to compression fit the light snugly. Since I haven't used it in the field I don't really know, but I'm guessing it's going to be a bit of a PITA to get it out of the holster, enough so that I doubt I'll use it. I do think you should chase it down and get yours, but I think you'll ultimately want something else which suits your purpose better. Anyone know of a good substitute?

It's a little lighter than my 2 D cell Maglite, just a few millimeters larger in diameter and approx. 1 D cell shorter. All of which translates to just what I was hoping for in size and weight. It has a great feel to it, and is laughably brighter. I can't wait to get it into the dark of night. I have shined it in the backyard and down the street, but for me the test will be when I'm hiking in the back country and of course using it for light painting photo's.

The interface seems straight forward enough, except for changing the mode to/from turbo mode. I don't see any signal that this change has taken place, and it seems a bit of a PITA to have to sit for 200 seconds with the light on high to see if it backs off to the next level as the only way to determine that the change has taken place. Am I missing something here?

I love the stopped down power options, which will come in very handy as brighter is not necessarily better when light painting. The built in diffuser looks like it will suit my needs perfectly and I intend to keep it on the light all the time. Only when I need the additional throw do I see taking it off, but until I actually get it in the field I don't know for sure. Just how it seems sitting here typing this.

The tint does appear white to my eye, but I'm thinking that it's going to take some monkeying with filters to get it to look right by my camera. Time will tell on that one, but I'm looking forward to making it work, whatever it takes.

I ended up purchasing the light with 3 Eagletac 3400 18650's and a Xtar SP-2 charger. The charger was certainly a different direction than I'd been intending to go and it may be that I regret it, but I was informed it's the fastest charger out there even if I need to charge in two separate steps for the 3 cells which sounded appealing at the time I bought it. Over time if it becomes a PITA, I'll just get another one.

Thanks to all who offered help in steering me to my purchase. As I said, so far so good.

 

[Mr. Tone]

The step down is barely noticeable. As I said earlier you literally have to be watching it right when it happens or you would not really notice without a light meter. Subjectively, a 20% increase/decrease is barely anything to our eyes. I am glad to hear you got it and are enjoying it. If you only have an incandescent Maglite to compare it to then, wow, what a difference indeed!

 

[Photogr]

I finally had an opportunity to take the light out in the field with me on my first photo-shoot and while we weren't shooting the type of subject which required any light painting, I was able to put the light through some test shots and get a feel for what I was working with.

The first and most important test is the tint. In the field I was pleasantly surprised how neutral white the light is. My buddy who was with me had brought along several lights he uses which include both a very warm brinkman and very cool Nitecore. The MX25L3 was almost perfectly in between the two when holding all 3 side by side and made it really easy to see the differences. Looking at the test shots for just tint it looks like it will be workable with little to no adjustment though until I get into specific shots I won't know for sure. This is all very good in my mind as this was the biggest issue facing my purchase and the light seems to have passed with flying colors (no pun intended).

Next issue up was the functionality and capability. I purchased the light with the kit primarily for the addition of the diffuser and tail cap. Both of these proved extremely useful. Our trip brought us into the mountains and it was about 10 degrees, so heavy gloves/mittens were a must. I didn't think I would like the tail cap, but it proved very advantageous since I lost feel for the button. Between the diffuser and the lights ability to step down the power. I had complete control to light paint from very close in without blowing out my subject.

On the far end it remains to be seen how well I'll be able to light paint. The floody nature of the beam may make it a challenge. I've already begun playing with a mouse pad which I intend to use as a snoot to help minimize the flood and let the center beam reach it's intended target. I just don't know how well this will work as it appeared to still give me a fair amount of spill even with the snoot extending almost a foot from the lens.

All in all I'm very happy with the light and want to thank everyone who helped me with my purchase!

 

[mmander]

I too am using flashlights for light-painting and also recently bought the MX25L3 with MT-G2. It's a gorgeous light with the most neutral beam and best colour rendering of all the lights I own. However it is not really a high CRI light. If you are shooting raw and processing your photos with either Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, I would suggest you consider using an Xrite ColorChecker Passport to create a custom calibration profile. A simple white-balance will only get you so far, and other colours -notably skin-tones- might still look off, but a custom camera calibration will go a long way towards making the light more usable and accurate photographically.

For certain precision light-painting tasks, the MX25L3 is definitely too floody although it is great for lighting up a larger area. I also have an ArmyTek Predator Pro v2.5 (cool) and a Predator v2.5 (warm) for those instances when I need more precision at a distance, since they have much tighter hotspots with a much dimmer spill. I have also ordered the new Thrunite TN32 for those times when I really need to reach out and light something up far away!

Here is an example of one of my early light-painting shots. Everything was lit with one SupBeam X40. My X40 is slightly brighter than my MX25L3, but with a much more blue-tinged beam and even more spill. The background trees were lit with the X40 cranked on high, the smaller details were with it turned down. I ran through the exposure for all this (2min 40sec), wearing dark clothes, never stopping for more than a few seconds and ensuring the light never shone back directly into the lens...

It would have been easier to do some of this if I also had the ArmyTek Predator, but that is a more recent purchase. I am not sure how much a snoot will help the MX25L3. I have experimented that way as well with my X40, but it requires a snoot large enough to be quite unwieldy! The hotspot is also fairly large on the MX25L3. I would definitely suggest looking at the ArmyTek Predator lights since for their size and weight, they have pretty much the tightest beam focus and best throw, at least as far as I'm aware.

Have fun light-painting and Happy New Year!

Mike Mander

 

[Mr. Tone]

I am glad you are having success with your new light. Thanks for letting us know

 

[Photogr]

I too am using flashlights for light-painting and also recently bought the MX25L3 with MT-G2. It's a gorgeous light with the most neutral beam and best colour rendering of all the lights I own. However it is not really a high CRI light. If you are shooting raw and processing your photos with either Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, I would suggest you consider using an Xrite ColorChecker Passport to create a custom calibration profile. A simple white-balance will only get you so far, and other colours -notably skin-tones- might still look off, but a custom camera calibration will go a long way towards making the light more usable and accurate photographically.

For certain precision light-painting tasks, the MX25L3 is definitely too floody although it is great for lighting up a larger area. I also have an ArmyTek Predator Pro v2.5 (cool) and a Predator v2.5 (warm) for those instances when I need more precision at a distance, since they have much tighter hotspots with a much dimmer spill. I have also ordered the new Thrunite TN32 for those times when I really need to reach out and light something up far away!

Here is an example of one of my early light-painting shots. Everything was lit with one SupBeam X40. My X40 is slightly brighter than my MX25L3, but with a much more blue-tinged beam and even more spill. The background trees were lit with the X40 cranked on high, the smaller details were with it turned down. I ran through the exposure for all this (2min 40sec), wearing dark clothes, never stopping for more than a few seconds and ensuring the light never shone back directly into the lens...

It would have been easier to do some of this if I also had the ArmyTek Predator, but that is a more recent purchase. I am not sure how much a snoot will help the MX25L3. I have experimented that way as well with my X40, but it requires a snoot large enough to be quite unwieldy! The hotspot is also fairly large on the MX25L3. I would definitely suggest looking at the ArmyTek Predator lights since for their size and weight, they have pretty much the tightest beam focus and best throw, at least as far as I'm aware.

Have fun light-painting and Happy New Year!

Mike Mander

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I wish you had seen my earlier threads sooner as it could have proven very helpful, but better late than never. The Armytek lights were pointed out to me as good options in some of those earlier conversations, but I ended up not going that way because I wanted more output. I may end up picking one up in the future, but I'm nervous about the tint's not matching creating blending challenges. Time will tell. I have a lot to learn about the tool I bought.


I hear you about the snoot challenges. I have a large mouse pad in my bag which I played with a bit and you may be right that the length needed to be effective is too long to be practical. I'm going out tonight for another shoot which will be a better test. No moonlight and a close mountain peak. It will be interesting to see what (if anything) I can light up at all.

I am glad you are having success with your new light. Thanks for letting us know

Thanks Mr. Tone!

 

[mmander]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I wish you had seen my earlier threads sooner as it could have proven very helpful, but better late than never. The Armytek lights were pointed out to me as good options in some of those earlier conversations, but I ended up not going that way because I wanted more output. I may end up picking one up in the future, but I'm nervous about the tint's not matching creating blending challenges. Time will tell. I have a lot to learn about the tool I bought.

I hear you about the snoot challenges. I have a large mouse pad in my bag which I played with a bit and you may be right that the length needed to be effective is too long to be practical. I'm going out tonight for another shoot which will be a better test. No moonlight and a close mountain peak. It will be interesting to see what (if anything) I can light up at all.

You're welcome. Tints not matching might be an issue, but one can work wonders with slight localized colour corrections in Lightroom or Photoshop, if you have one area lit with a different light that looks slightly off. Depends on how much time and effort you have to work on each shot, and how important absolute accuracy is?

This might interest you. I have some examples of an Xrite ColorChecker Passport lit by various lights and comparing to a daylight calibration too. This will show you the degree of colour accuracy improvement you might see with a custom calibration. These were originally raw files shot with my Fujifilm X-E2. You will see that there are no basic changes to the neutral patches before and after calibration, but that there are changes to some of the colour patches...

Target lit with an EagleTac MX25L3 (MT-G2) - Adobe Standard Conversion...

Target lit with an EagleTac MX25L3 (MT-G2) - Same image as before but after Xrite calibration...

Here is an animated GIF showing the two. Of course GIFs are not continuous tone and suffer from dithering artifacts, and if you are running a wide-gamut monitor the GIF will look over-saturated compared to the JPEGs (like it does on mine) and will definitely exaggerate the differences, but it should give you an idea of the hue changes pre/post calibration, especially if you squint to blur out the dithering...

Here is another example, same thing with my SupBeam X40...

Notice here that there are slightly more changes perhaps than with the MX25L3, owing to the somewhat lower CRI and cooler tint of the XM-L2 LEDs used in the X40...

Finally, even daylight images can see improvement with an Xrite calibration, so not all of the variations seen above are due to the lights themselves! This was shot in December high-noon sun...

Mostly, you'll see a density/saturation boost in some colours after a daylight calibration (also camera dependant), like the dark blue and dark red patches for example, but not as much of a hue shift as you get with the flashlights...

Lastly, here are the Adobe Standard renderings for all three in an animation...

One last point to note with the above animation, is that relatively speaking, the two flashlights are closer to each other than either is to daylight, so as long as there are no huge colour temperature differences, for example using a warm-white 3500K LED light together with a very cool, say 6500K one, you might find that they can mesh quite well in a photograph, presuming critical colour accuracy is not a requirement and you just want an aesthetically pleasing result. However, if you were to be doing a clothing shoot for a client for example, where accuracy might be critical for bright colours, then you'd likely not want to mix light sources, regardless if we're talking LED or anything else for that matter...

Anyway, I hope this helps illustrate the colour rendering advantages of a custom calibration? And no, I don't work for Xrite!