Finally got the First Alert Multi color Flashlight!

Had this on the back burner of my wishlist, and was keeping an eye out in stores to see if it would appear. It of course, first appeared on think geek (not sure of it was branded as First Alert yet), and then disappeared from there, but then was offered elsewhere.

When I mentioned it to my wife, (and showed her the YouTube videos) she decided to just order it online as a sort of late Christmas/birthday present. It only took a few days, so I don't know why I've reamained so avoiding of online ordering. I guess I like to be able to pick it up in a store, and hopefully test it.

So it's pretty cool, and very bright. It's true RGB, rather than SRGB (separate LED's), and while you can see the primary colors in the light when looking directly into it, it still casts well saturated beams.

First you press the buttons to get the ten colors. The "11th" color is a rapid cycle through the colors, and the next one after that is the colors transitioning more slowly.

white
red
green
blue
orange
turquoise; called "light green"
a bluish magenta; called "purple", and described as having black light effects
amber/yellow
cyan ("light blue")
magenta ("pink")

What I had always wished for was for this to have sliders controlling the three primaries to mix any color. It was particularly soft white I had in mind as making. But with this range of other colors, it is almost as god as that!

I have one (well, three) of these from woot. Quite nifty little flashlights, but I've never gotten around to posting about them. A few observations/comments:

• Took me a while to find: long-press the side button (about 2 seconds) to cycle through steady, quick blink (160/min), and slow blink (40/min) in the current color -- this works in the color-switching and color-fading modes as well. Continue to hold the side button down for another 2 seconds or so, and the light goes out. Tap the side button again to bring it back on in the same color, steady-on (regardless of previous blink state). This stuff is in the manual, but I didn't read it at first, or even see it in the package.
  
• These trivially convert to 18650 -- all you need is an insulating washer to keep the 18650's + terminal from shorting to the retaining ring at the head.
  
  Fortunately, they come with a ready-made rubber disc, used to keep the AAA batteries from draining during shipping -- just punch a small hole in the center, then work it over the spring in the head. If you threw it out already, painting the ring with nail polish (while the tube is screwed in tight) might work, or make/find something else to work.
  
  Length may be an issue with some protected cells, but mine are just barely OK. Unprotected cells should all be fine, but I'm not sure of the low-voltage behavior. Since each diode is driven with its own resistor, it will be brighter (possibly overdriven? I don't know.) on 18650 than 3xAAA due to the lower internal resistance, and no resistance from the carrier.
  
• PWM-haters, forget it! This only drives one color at a time, creating a DLP-ish effect when you move it quickly. Different colors are created by PWMing all three pulses accordingly. Even the solid colors red, green, and blue are only ~80% duty cycle.
  
• Oh, and don't believe a word of the back of the package when it goes describing the colors -- it's pure RGB, so purple will not cause any more "blacklight effects" (fluorescence) than blue, and blue will have more blue light, thus more fluorescence. There's a few other similarly bogus statements, but I don't have the package handy. The colors beyond white, red, green, and blue are IMHO mostly to impress people with, although maybe one of the yellow/orange colors could be useful as a taillight or be-seen headlight on a bike, depending on your region's rules/conventions; the red fast-blink is quite handy for me this way.

Oh, cool! Just tried it.
The manual was folded up small, and I missed it until this morning, and it's all in diagram mode.
It even continues to flash in the cycling modes.

I like the DLP effect. Makes even the while look colorful.

I don't know what an 18650 is.

18650 is the most common size of lithium ion batteries. They're 18mm in diameter (between an AA and a C cell) and 65mm long (a little over a D cell), and have 2-3 times the energy capacity of 3 LSD NiMH AAA cells.