Defiant 150 Lumen Extended Runtime Lantern

Last night I picked up the Defiant 150 Lumen Extended Runtime Lantern at home depot for a mere $10.
I took it apart. See the Innards here
It has a small die Cree emitter, on a silver base, It might be a XP-G2 emitter, but I really don't know.
Four phillips head screws hold the unit together, and swapping out the LED would be simple.
It sits on top of a significant heat sink.
Behind the circuit board there is a resistor, and a capacitor.
Visible is a small micro-controller

The lantern is made of hard plastic, and has a securely attached handle on top. It should take a fair amount of abuse. The top of the lantern is as flat as the bottom, so one can stand it on its head as easily as on its tail. Although I haven't tried it with dark adjusted eyes in a dark room yet, it seems like standing it on its head reduces glare significantly.

It has a plastic hook in the base that flips out, so that the unit can be hung upside down, similarly to the Siege and UST lanterns, but it feels a bit flimsy, and I imagine, easy to break.

It has three modes.

It cycles.... high, medium, low, strobe, off.
With fresh batteries I measured the ma.
150 lumen high 810 ma
Estimated 85 lumen med 460 ma
20 lumen low 70 ma
strobe 100 ma

Whats the glare like then?
And them stats cannot be right if they are there I something wrong.

The glare is similar to looking at a ping pong ball resting on top of a tail standing flashlight, IF you position the lantern such that you can SEE the white opaque diffuser. IF on the other hand, you position that lantern so that you don't see the white diffuser, it is much better, maybe no glare at all. I'll need to test it with dark adjusted eyes, in a dark room, yet, so I can't swear to it.

In other words, if you tail stand it on top of a refridgerator, depending upon how tall you are, you may or may not see the diffuser, if you head stand it, there would be glare.

If it is on the table, tail standing, you'll be able to look right at the white diffuser... glare! But if you head stand it, You won't see the white diffuser, and there will be little to no glare.

Also with THREE output settings, you can mitigate glare by reducing the output level.

Regarding the ma readings, they were taken with a Fluke 73 III.
I just re-did them with a $10 harbor freight CEN-TECH and I got lower readings.
High, 600ma
med 300ma
low 50ma.

Now... the 150 lumens, and 20 lumens for high and low were manufacturer numbers. And I agree they seem like low lumens for the amperage pulled.

Any chance you can do a runtime test on low to see if it lasts the full month?

I expressed concern that my fluke might be out of calibration to a friend, who brought over an old Simpson 260 analog meter that was $1300 in it's day. I used my 2.8 amp on high C8 and compared the amp draw to both the fluke, and the Simpson, and they were comparable. So I think that my Fluke readings are accurate.

I put fresh cells in a modded 3D cell lantern that pulls nearly an amp on high and it has a neutral XB-D emitter. At an amp that should do about 300 lumens. I then compared it to the Defiant 150 lumen lantern, and the Defiant appeared to have a higher output. I checked the Cree XP-G2 datasheet, and it should do about 315 lumens at 800ma. So it seems that Defiant is under-reporting the output of their lantern.

It would seem that the high is about 315 lumens
Medium is about 210 lumens
Low is reported to be about 20 lumens

These lanterns are marked down to $8.40 online, but they are out of stock online. They state that they are on clearance, and the price is good until Feb 28th. and that there is a limited supply. I picked up another one yesterday at the store, they gave it to me at the online price. I now have five of them

I'll gift one or two, maybe three. Considering that the included batteries are worth $3, this is a steal.

These are still on clearance, out of stock online, but there may be some at a store near you. $7.20 until March 27, 2016.

I tried to do a run time test with it at medium mode.
I thought I would use my phone and a lux meter app. and then convert the numbers to a percentage of the original output. Unfortunately the numbers were too erratic to be of value so after fifteen hours of taking measurements every hour, I decided to measure the ma draw, and calculate the output based upon the Cree XP-G2 datasheet.

The driver for this lantern is a PIA for trying to give an accurate output/run-time picture, because the driver drops the output over the course of an hour (at about 40 minutes) thus extending the run-time. If you turn the lantern off and then back on, it resets the clock, and the output goes back up to what the battery can supply.

How I ultimately did the test...
I used two identical lanterns.
I placed them side by side in a dark closet.

I let one run the batteries down, and hourly compared it to the other one with fresh batteries in it.
Each hour, I turned the test light off and back to medium, resetting the clock each time.
Therefore for the first fifteen hours or so, the lantern was on full medium, about 3/4ths of the time and at a reduced output 1/4th of the time. Or something like that.
At the beginning of the 16th hour, I decided to just take ma readings and let it run, and calculate, guesstimate the output.

NEXT PAGE:

Estimated outputs initially are:
800 ma ~315 lumens high
460ma ~210 lumens medium
50ma ~ 20 lumens low.

I set the lantern on medium:
I restarted the lantern each hour.
At the end of the 6th hour, when the lantern was restarted I compared it to another with fresh batteries, and it was between medium, and low, but pretty close to the initial medium.

10 hours later (the 16th hour) it was still between medium and low, and still closer to medium. Possibly 65% of where it was initially. So, let's guesstimate that to be 120 lumens.

At this point I took ma readings and just let it run on medium:
340 ma high (about 150 lumens)
180 ma medium (about 77 lumens)
forty minutes later the driver dropped the output to 80ma ~37 lumens.
It maintained the 80ma ~37 lumens for another hour then I turned it off for the night.

The next day, (the batteries had a chance to recover a bit over the night)
Medium started at 250ma ~105 lumens,
an hour later 140 ma
and an additional hour later it leveled off at 100ma ~ 40 lumens for another 5 hours.

At this point the batteries have about 25 hours on them.

I turned it off and back on and took some readings.
high 380 ma ~160 lumens
medium 210 ma ~ 90 lumens
low 40 ma ~ 20 lumens

About an hour later, it was back to 100ma ~ 40 lumens.
Two hours later still holding at 100ma ~40 lumens, I decided to do some calculations.

Under load the batteries are reporting 1.285 volts.
Looking at HKJ's charts for D cells under 100 ma load, at that voltage, I suspect the lantern will run for an additional 90 hours or so.