Why No Cree or Seoul Lights With A Really Low Setting????

[thehappyman]

Low Light has it's uses...... I love my Gladius for a lot of things. One of those things is it's ability to dim down to a bit less than 1 lumen - I use it everynight as a book light.
I prefer it to a clip on "reading light" because the beam is very very thin and focused and the perfect brightness to lite up just the portion of the page I am reading and the color is better.
Gotta use the light so I dont keep my wife up.

And at that low "power level", the Gladius lasts 400 hours on a set of batteries. Thats 16.5 days/24 hours a day.

There arent all that many lights that will dim way down. I wish the P1D-CE and the Neo T5 did.

 

[tebore]

A stock HDS had 0.08lm as the lowest. The U/B85 had 0.12lm as it's lowest.

A rough calculation shows that a Seoul'ed HDS would have around 0.15-0.20lm basically loosing the lowest level.

My light is set to ~0.33lm for the lowest level.

 

[Data]

. . .

So why can we not get a nice three to four level CREE/Seoul light with spacing something like.....

Level 1 - LOW - .5-1 lumen. (100-300 hours)
Level 2 - LOW MID - 5-10 lumens. (15-40 hours)
Level 3 - HIGH - 40-60 lumens. (1.5-2.5 hours)
Level 4 - Turbo - 80-100 lumens. (30-50 minutes)

. . .

Wayne's new converter board for my SPY light will easily run at a very small fraction of a lumen. It can be set so low it looks like it is off unless you take it into a dark room to inspect it. This converter board provides a current source (level one is a voltage source) that drives the LED with a pure DC signal. It has six power levels and they are user adjustable.

Cheers
Dave

 

[Calina]

I'm guessing it is due to the power supplies not evolving at the same rate as LED efficiency. Let us compare the P1D and P1D-CE. To avoid having to re-design a new power supply, Fenix simply used the original one for the *-CE. Now, low in the P1D may have been more than enough for most people, however, the Cree is almost twice as efficient as the Luxeon. So, on that same power supply, it is far too bright for some people. Ideally, new power suppiles (converter circuits) would be designed for each generation LED, but these extra costs would have to be passed on to us, the consumer.

The changes needed are minimal and the cost would not be that high.
But Fenix didn't have time to redesign their electronics, simply because they wanted to be the first on the market with a Cree light. (We wanted these lights so badly, and they responded and we paid for it, of course). This is good business sense but far from optimal in terms of quality.

For the LOD-CE though, they had the time to correct the circuits and there is no excuses; especially at the price they charge for it.

 

[flashy bazook]

as another choice, the Gatlight V3 will have a continuously variable switch, so will have all the lows you might wish!

That way you don't have to carry a key-ring tiny LED which you can buy for a few bucks at any store and which will complement your main EDC light at a tiny cost in weight and bulk, as I suggested, but you can instead pay $370 for the priviledge of the 1 lumen (or less?) low on a single flashlight, this is a choice available to you as a consumer!

(I am dramatizing the situation to make a point - the HDS's are also very expensive lights...).

 

[T4R06]

i love the low mode on C-LE