Did Inova upgrade LEDs in X5?

Was not impressed with what I'd read about X5 output, but couldn't resist playing with them at Target. Well, I checked about 20 of those with white LEDs (you know the little cutout with "Try It!" on the bottom?) and found something surprising. OK, it's projecting through the plastic packaging, and I had to wiggle that a bit to be really for certain yep youbetcha sure, but their output seemed to fall into two groups, one significantly brighter than the other.

Of the brighter ones, there seemed to be some small differences in focus of the individual LEDs, and I finally narrowed it down to the three best and took one of those. It sure puts out more than I expected - slightly bluish but not bad and perfectly even flood of light. (Way more even than a blue one a friend has.)

I used my Gossen F photographic meter with incident attachment to make some approximate lux readings at one meter using pretty fresh batteries, and the *comparative* results differ quite a bit from Quickbeam's (now-dated?) measurements:
X5 lux vs Inova T2: 50% (Quickbeam got 12%)
X5 lux vs new Surefire L1: 20% (Quickbeam got 6%)

So, uh, what's going on here? Same model number and labeling on the packaging. If they switched to something new and improved you'd think they would not do so quietly...

I think you have to consider that there is no way to tell how much battery usage from "Try Me" people has occurred on each flashlight.

magic79 said:

I think you have to consider that there is no way to tell how much battery usage from "Try Me" people has occurred on each flashlight.

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Welcome Majic! He is right, these are direct drive, but then again you might be on to something!

:goodjob:

-PSM

Is it possible the latest ones have been upgraded to Nichia CS LEDs?

Well, if Inova doesn't do it, I'm going to follow nemul's excellent advice and do it myself.

magic79 said:

I think you have to consider that there is no way to tell how much battery usage from "Try Me" people has occurred on each flashlight.

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Oh yes, magic, I thought of that too. Of course, some kid would have had to turn a bunch of them on steady and left them to burn, not easy to do through the little hole in the plastic package accessing the rubber button. Or customers would have spent hours mashing down a bunch of buttons!

But even that doesn't explain the rather large disparity between what this light is *said* to put out and its brightness relative to center-beam lux readings I get from 2 regulated lights with collimation optics - especially the T2 which has extraordinarly effective (flat) regulation. Even considering the relative imprecision of my measurement setup, the X5 I bought appears to have a central brightness of something close to 4x what previous data indicated. That is just weird.

Made me wonder if they had gotten a hint from those doing Nichia CS mods. Also makes me want to know what the runtime is now, but cheap ******* that I am, I hate wasting two perfectly good 123's and the time required considering I don't have an automated setup. Sigh. Maybe I will have to make one.

I know that the X1s I bought from Target recently definitely have later generations LEDs in them, compared to the one I bought two years ago. Much higher brightness (sorry, I do not dare to quantify with naked eyes. WAAAY brigher). Not battery related, switched the batteries between them.

yeah there are two groups of them at target played with and havent been played with

I've always liked the X5, but was never impressed with their brightness. How hard is the Nichia CS conversion to do? I can't solder and unsolder. I hope it doesn't involve "freeze popping" the light or any of that stuff..

My 3 years old X5 is not nearly as bright as current models, and it doesn't have much runtime so it cannot be degraded LEDs. They are definitely using better LEDs now.

I meant to say I CAN solder and desolder. Doh!


I am just wondering how hard it is to mod an X5 with the latest hotshot LEDs before I plunk down some cash.