Shawn A.,
Each design has it's trade-offs. The EDC Ultimate/Basic were exceptionally good at very long runtimes at very low brightness settings. The new design is not quite as good at the low power settings but it will still suck a primary cell almost dry.
CPEng,
The designer does know where the limits are. Just because your light does not hit thermal limit does not mean that the next light won't. I'll simply say there there is a lot more to setting the limitations than you may think. Things that are safe for a single custom flashlight are not necessarily safe for 100 or 1000 flashlights in a production environment.
Adamlau,
I think this may be an apples and oranges comparison. Allow me to explain.
One assumption in the statement is that the glass lens is fairly delicate and prone to catastrophic failure. Our lens and lens housing design do an excellent job of protecting the lens and keeping it from breaking. The pummeled light was exposed to severe abuse and the lens never broke.
The design being referred to is very similar to the design we used for the EDC Ultimate and EDC Basic flashlights. That design was prone to catastrophic failure and that design did benefit from using a sapphire lens. The new design is totally different and there is almost no practical benefit from going to sapphire.
Another assumption in the statement is that glass is somehow prone to scratching and sapphire is not. Granted, sapphire is more scratch resistant than glass is. However, in a well recessed design such as our new design, there are very few opportunities for the lens to be scratched. Even with scratching, most of the scratches will end up in the center of the lens. However, the center of the lens has the least affect on light output and beam pattern. The exterior parts of the lens - the parts that are the least likely to scratch - are the parts that have the most affect on the beam pattern and the total light output.
It would take a lot of scratching - a very noticeable amount - before the light output from an ultra-clear lens would fall below that of a sapphire lens with no scratches. However, in real use, a sapphire lens would also be accumulating scratches but at a slower rate. In practical terms, even heavy users may never see the day when their ultra-clear lens accumulated enough scratches that they got less light out compared to using a sapphire lens under the same conditions.
Increasing the cost of the flashlight by $40 while decreasing the performance by 10 to 15% does not seem like a customer pleaser to me. Does sapphire give you bragging rights? You bet. Does it bring any practical benefits in this particular application? No.
Thujone,
The other company uses plastic lenses so scratching is a significant issue but breakage is not.
Kid9P,
Things are coming together rapidly. I figured keeping the schedule from slipping was a bit more important that a photo.
Let me see what I can come up with this weekend.
GottaWearShades,
The GT versions will be in the first offerings. I assume all of the dealers will carry the GT versions.
At this point we are thinking that there will not be a Cr (red dim) model. We can add a feature that I think will be far more useful to the average person by not supporting the dim red for the Ra Clicky flashlights. Unfortunately, the two features conflict in hardware. Since the Ra Twisty cannot support that feature anyway, it will continue to be offered with dim red.
Henry.
