Ted's Blog

Summary

Pros:

• Bright
• Long runtime
• Good heat sinking
• Great build quality

Cons:

• No real low

Build Quality

My first impression is that it is smaller than I thought, but also heavier. This is a serious hunk of metal! One nice thing about getting it second hand from a CPF member is the guy I bought it from treated it very well. There aren't any marks on it that I could see. Plus he made sure to lubricate the o-rings and actually modified the tail switch so that you can halfway press it and the light comes on momentarily (all of my other lights have reverse clickies that you have to click all the way on and then let go before the light comes on; this light has a forward clicky). One of the reasons I got this light is that it had very good heat sinking and comes completely apart. The LED is mounted to a large brass pill that screws into the throat of the flashlight (threaded portion is 29mm diameter and the part that holds the driver is 23mm). The brass carries the heat from the LED directly into the body of the flashlight near its heaviest part. People talk about the light getting fairly hot after using it for a while, and that is a good thing. What would be much worse is the body staying cool while the LED cooks itself. Still, I left the light on for about 15 minutes and it only got warm. It would be pretty neat to be able to buy an extra pill and add my own 21mm driver and LED (maybe a warm P7 or a SST-50), almost like having a drop-in.

(All images in this review can be clicked to open a window with a picture twice the size shown here).

All of the pieces seem of high quality. The bezel seems like stainless and the reflector is aluminum (some lights have plastic reflectors). Reviewers on DX complain that the glass lens seems kind of thin, and I would agree with that. Because the lens is larger in area, it probably needs to be a little thicker as well. Another mm of thickness would be good. I was a little suprised that the body doesn't seem to screw off separtely from head. At the silver ring you would think there would be a threaded joint, but there doesn't seem to be (actually the pictures on DX showing it coming apart there, but I can't budge it and don't see any reason to force anything). Instead it is primarily three pieces: the tail, the tube with head, and the bezel. Actually, the tube has an extension in it so that it can take the two 18650's instead of 3 CR123A's. With a maximum of 18 volts allowable, the light should be able to use 4 16340's (reviews on DX say they won't fit; again I see no reason to try). I don't have any 16340's or enough CR123A's to do a test. So the extension tube adds an extra part. Still, nice o-rings everywhere. The modded tail switch has a rubber boot, but I don't know if it would be waterproof or not, though given the care the previous owner took with the light, I wouldn't be against it being fully dunkable. The tail piece itself feels like it might be made of plastic, though I don't know why it would be.

Here's the big brass pill next to a P60 drop-in:

A look into the throat where the pill screws in:

Battery Life

Some people on DX were claiming 1.5-2 hours, but on two gray 2400mAh protected Trustfire 18650's I only got one hour. Turning the light off to measure current and voltage every 15 minutes at the battery, I got 1.31A at 4.2V and pretty steadily to 1.51A at 3.58V when I stopped the test. Here are the results:

Repeating the test with 2 gray protected Ultrafire 2400mAh 18650's that I got with the light, I got another 15 minutes, so the Trustfires maybe aren't so great:

The light output seemed pretty constant the whole time. Based on Low being about a third of the draw of High, you could get 3 hours. At a 1.4A draw, 2400mAh batteries should yield an hour and 40 minutes, but I wasn't running the battery all the way down either. If the driver is supplying 2.8A, then it would be running pretty efficiently, but I doubt I'm getting that. While leaving it on for that time, most of the body became quite warm, but not too hot to hold. For the first 15 minutes it was only a little warm. Anyway, I'm a little disappointed in the runtime. I think with two batteries, it should last longer than an hour. But I am impressed that the brightness didn't seem to fade and the results seem to indicate it is well regulated, but with a buck converter that is a lot easier to do and should be more efficient as well.

Light Output

Turning it on, it didn't seem insanely bright inside the house. The sun was setting but it wasn't quite dark, so it wasn't all that impressive outdoors either. I did notice a slight greenish tint to the light. The sequence of modes is High, Low, and a killer Strobe. The mode memory seems to work fine. The momentary on of the modded forward clicky will change modes if you cycle quickly, but if you leave the light off for 1 second or more, you stay in the same mode. So no good for morse code, but fine for "tactical" use (whatever that is).

I waited a little longer for it to get dark and then took out my Ultrafire WF-504B that I just got last week to do a comparison. Now this isn't really fair. The 504B has a Cree XR-E R2 LED in it that can produce about 200 lumens. This light can produce 600 lumens (DX says 900 lumens, but I doubt it). The R2 has a 26.5mm diameter reflector head, this one has a 52.8mm one. The 504B has one 18650 battery, this one has two.

Here are some shots indoors of both beams, the 1200L on the right. The big reflector does a good job of concentrating light into a very tight hotspot. If the light is within a few inches of the wall, you can see a + in the middle of the P7 hotspot because of the separation of the 4 different LED dies. But at this distance of 50cm, you can see the + is gone. If the light is further than that from the wall, you get a small donut hole which persists at just about any distance. I tried tweaking the height of the pill and how much the reflector is screwed into the head, but couldn't get rid of the donut hole. It's really not that bad.

It isn't an enormous difference as I reduce the shutter time down to 1/100th and 1/1600th of a second.

Here is the 504b on medium and the 1200 on "low":

Outdoors in the dark, the differences really stand out. This light lights up everything around with some decent flood, but really has great throw. For reference, first is a control shot of the darkness:

Now a shot of the WF-504B on high with a Cree XR-E R2 LED. This is a good thrower so it does a decent job of lighting up the fence post 120' away and to the left of the upright forked stick 25' away.

But here is the WF-1200L and you can see it is lighting up areas past the fence that weren't even noticed before.

I had to turn it to low so the stick wouldn't burst into flames (just kidding). So here is another shot of the 1200L, but now on "low":

The Low isn't all that low and still almost as bright as the 504B on high and it still has a lot of throw. Really there should be the incredibly bright high at 600 lumens, a more reasonable Medium of about 200 lumens that would be like high on most lights, and then a true Low down around 20 lumens. It might even be worth having something around 80 lumens.

I don't have a light meter, so I can't measure the lumens. Nor do I have any experience with other 600-lumen lights. But somehow this doesn't quite look like 600 lumens to me. I know a lot of DX lights with P7's only get about 400 lumens or so. This is significantly brighter than the 200 lumens of the R2, but I was expecting a little more somehow.

Conclusion

I like having a bright light and it is nice that it has so much throw since some P7's are all flood. But, honestly, the light probably isn't going to be used that much because it is so big and heavy. I am impressed with the quality and weight of the light. I'm not sure what more money would buy from a more reputable manufacturer. A lot of DX lights need some tweaking when you get them, and because this light is second-hand by someone knowledgeable, that stuff has been done (or maybe wasn't needed).

The light retails for $73, which is still a bargain compared to non-budget brands with P7 or MC-E emitters. But there are 2x18650 lights like the Aurora for only $47 that look pretty similar. I feel like I got a really good deal getting a big discount on a well-maintained and probably lightly used light, but I would never pay $73. So based on the as-new price, I don't think I can give it 5 stars.