Helios, Super6, IRT2AA

I had a huge review readied up for the Helios, Super 6, and the 2AA from Inretech , but through the holiday swivel, bad pictures and deleted files, I had to start from scratch again with scattered notes during the tests... Now, to the gut of the expo...

These 3 guys were very well made, and I was thoroughly impressed with the 3X white 5Watt Helios. It is, at least on eye observation to me, the brightest LED light I have. The Super6 is an awesome floodlight, and its 6 1W whites can flood an entire room in white color, and can more than serve as a candle in blackouts. The 2AA model was greener than I had expected, but with lithium batteries, is almost as bright as my BB500...

From left to right: Super6 3D, Helios 6D, 2AA


A disemboweled shot of the Helios, with 6 2.2Ah Energizer NiMHs and 6 8Ah Gen NiMHs. The circuit platform is in the center, and the collimators are in the lens head.


Helios beamshot from 1 foot away at a white wall: BLINDING BRIGHT


Super6 beamshot from 1 foot away at a white wall: Uniform white color


2AA beamshot from 1 foot away at a white wall: Notice the green tint, which is NOT a product of the camera lens


Screenshot of Helios (left) versus ElectroLumen's QuadLux (right).


Screenshot of InReTech 2AA (left) versus Dat2zip's BB500 (right).


Now, a side note. These lights and their beamshots were taken at default light level, with my digicam's lens adjusted to artificial light. So what you see here is as close to what you see at eye sight as possible, without any program manipulations. The 2 comparison shots were taken 1 foot away from a brownish carpet. I elected not to do the Super6 versus ElektroLumen's OctoLux, because it showed up as just a big blob of white...

Now, I did a runtime on the Helios with the 8Ah NiMHs and a new set of Duracells, but because of the lost notes, the 8Ah NiMH battery test note is the only data I have. Slept early, woke up and started the test at 12AM midnight:

0:00-9:25 really bright to bright
9:26-12:30 fading brightness to near ArcLS bright
12:31-18:00 fading ArcLS bright to CMG Reactor bright w/ alkalines

At the 18 hour mark, I went to sleep and left it on. It was barely warm to the touch all this time, and when I woke up the next morning, it was still putting out more light than an Arc AAA. I turned the light off at the 48 hour mark, still with Arc AAA like output...

Conclusion:
The Helios and Super6 were well made. I couldn't disassemble the Super6 (seemingly epoxied); otherwise, I would've. The dropin module for the Helios was rugged and very professional. The heatsinking was spectacularly done. The 2AA had a green tinge that was very noticeable against any other LS based lights I own. But with lithiums, it reduced the green somewhat.

In all, I'm very pleased with the 3 lights, even the 2AA. It is still a great backup light. And right now, the Helios and Super6 are constantly rotating as my night walk lights and room candle lights, along with my QuadLux and my OctoLux...

You can check these guys and other lights out at www.inretech.com. Inretech has another light I was really interested in that uses 6 5W white LSs, and that guy would probably be declared illegal in roadside use because it would be so blinding...

Thank you for the wonderfull reviews, we are very pleased with the performance of the products

I bought a Trilight. I ordered a 2AA and Helios within a day of receiving the Trilight - does that express my option?

The Mega6 can't be driven at full power with 6 Alkaine or NiMH batteries. That may be a good thing at 30W! You could get the power needed in a useful form-factor with Tadrian cells but you still have a lot of heat to get rid of.

The only thing that bothered me about the 6 D-cell lights (Helios and Mega6) is that these use really big bodies, bigger than I consider comfortable to carry.

Originally posted by James Van Artsdalen:
The Mega6 can't be driven at full power with 6 Alkaine or NiMH batteries. That may be a good thing at 30W! You could get the power needed in a useful form-factor with Tadrian cells but you still have a lot of heat to get rid of.

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Could you eleaborate a little for me, please?
Are you saying that NiMh don't give enough current or ????

Does anyone have a Mega 6 yet?
I would love to see the Mega 6 vs the Super 6 and the Helios thrown in for good measure.
(Yes, two of them ARE right here).

I know that out of these, two are floods, while the other is a spot, but if/when I get one, it will be one of these three.

Well, with heat problems, something like a small, compact body is out of the question. It had to be all aluminum as well.

Of course, if you had wanted to get the power up to the full 30 watts, you could retrofit a 6D cell light to fit 8C cells, and get 12 volts. You would need to have a constant current 2.5A to distribute to 6 LSs, and each would still be underdriven at 420ma...

Now for the white Helios to become available again (let us all give Luxeon a collective kick in the ***)

What incandesant would you compare the Helios too?
Eric

Originally posted by Floating Spots:
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Originally posted by James Van Artsdalen:
The Mega6 can't be driven at full power with 6 Alkaine or NiMH batteries.

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Could you eleaborate a little for me, please?
Are you saying that NiMh don't give enough current or ????
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">A Mega6 has six D cells and six 5W emitters. That's essentially one cell of power for each emitter.

With 1.2v per NiMH cell you'd draw just over 4A to get 5W and that is more current than they're rated for.

I have no doubt that a Mega6 is really, really bright, and I may yet order one. But there's nothing Inretech can do in a practical sense to fully drive the thing. Maybe a custom mod to put it in an X990?

At the end of the day the real problem to doing a fully-driven Mega6 would be heat dissipation. You could probably fully drive a Mega6 with just 3 or 4 D-cell Tadrians but what affordable body could handle the heat? And, given the cost of the batteries, such a light is limited to emergency or highly specialized applications.

PS. The reason I haven't ordered a Mega6 is that I'm hesitant about how often I'd use something as big as a 6D M*glight body. I almost always favor smaller lights, with ElektroLumen's 5W Cyan 3xCR123 being the one I usually reach for first, and that's a Brinkman NexStar 2C body.

EDIT: Forget Tadrian. I misread their spec. They can't deliver the current a flashlight needs.

Pics coming in 5 mins...

Here are some comparison shots of perspective from 26 feet away, with the plant in the middle as center object...

Vs SureFire M6 in HOLA


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Vs Brinkmann Legend LX


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Vs PT Surge


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Vs 6C Mag Wide and Focused


You can make the comparisons for yourself. Frankly, the only light of this bunch I would put before the Helios is the M6, and that's not saying much, when I start to think about battery costs...

I'll group the pictures together later to get a better comparison of all of them...

The Helios is so wide that comparing it to an incandescent that's prefocused is unfair. What it can compare to is all my M$gL$tes with the same beam degree, and if you spread the beam to the same width of the Helios, there's no comparison: The Helios is much brighter and throws much farther.

FalconFX

Thanks for the review and photos.
That Helios is seriously bright!

Great, I've just spent 10 minutes looking at the 6th photo from the top trying to work out why your flashlights seem totally impervious to gravity!

I'm guessing they're on some kind of little glass table?
Please tell me it's a glass table!

Originally posted by Grummond:
[QB]Great, I've just spent 10 minutes looking at the 6th photo from the top trying to work out why your flashlights seem totally impervious to gravity!

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">They emit so much light that their thrust/weight ratio from photon pressure is 1.0

Heh, Yep.

It's on an elongated glass table. The pic of the disemboweled Helios shows it lying on the glass surface... I took the pic standing on top of the table...

FYI - I looked over an e-mail from Mike this weekend and he did say he's run a Mega6 at full power from a bench supply. This implies to me that the Mega6 is designed for it if you can find a way to provide enough power.

Mike will have to comment on how big a problem heat dissipation is at full power.

30 watts of heat on PCBs? Don't sound good...

In all fairness to InReTech, I think for the type of flashlight body they could get the module to fit in and have reasonable space left for collimators, they couldn't have done it any better with the heatsink they had on the Helios. Certainly, they couldn't have sacraficed much more PCB in order to create a good circuit for the emitters.

Now I would imagine that because the Mega6 doesn't utilize any collimators, they could actually beef up the aluminum heatsink (or copper heatsink, if need be) even more...

Very little heat was generated out of the head of the M$g after a full continuous hour of use, and the PCB was only warm to the touch. If I'd had the need to, I would've applied Arctic Silver to the dropin module to increase thermal dispersion to the aluminum flashlight body...

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Ahh well. I'm off to Minneapolis/St Paul. In the nearing woods, this'll give me a chance to test the Helios in camping conditions and possibly out in snow conditions.

I can start to see the reactions of the flight attendants and people sitting around me when I flick on and off the 5WSE Cyan, and if I'm crazy enough to carry the Helios with me on the plane... I'm hoping (or not hoping for, depending) that security won't make me go through the whole routine of making me empty all my flashlights of their batteries and then turning them on. The one inspection gal took my Arc-LS and aimed it about 2 inches from her eyes and turned it on...

We really can't make the heatsink any larger

We try to get it to fit as close to the flashlight case as possible and still be installable, but your comment is very well taken about using Arctic Silver around the module to better conduct heat to the flashlight case

I have been able to run the MEGA6/CYAN at 93% POWER in a 6D Flashlight case, and I think I am going to get some welding goggles !

I "cheated" a little thou - I ran a STREAMLIGHT 5x(Short-D) battery pack and 3 Normal D Nicads

Current was approx 4.2A which is just shy of the max 4.5A

Doing some rough calculations, I expect approx 30-45 mins of operation from these batteries

I assume the ShortD's are approx 3/5 the Amp/Hr of the normal 4AH batteries

Flashlight weight 3lbs 3oz

We will have the WHITE HELIOS/MEGA6 available just as soon as we can get more WHITE 5w parts

Happy Holidays

Originally posted by INRETECH:
I "cheated" a little thou - I ran a STREAMLIGHT 5x(Short-D) battery pack and 3 Normal D Nicads

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I had always vaguely assumed it was a bad idea to use batteries in series if they weren't a matched set. Won't it be very hard on a cell if it completely discharges while other cells are still going strong?

I'm wondering if this is something I can try (does that Streamlight battery pack fit in a 6D and do terminal need to be added?) or if this is best left as a one-off bench experiment.

Yes, you are correct - this is just something I put together for a test