Got the Energizer light today. Not bad overall for 12 bucks. The emitter is off-center but it doesn't really affect the beam. The beam profile and color temp reminds me a lot of the AAA Sofirn C01s with the SST neutral LED and TIR optic. Very nice.
The bad news: after 10 minutes maybe, it subtly ramps down to the low level, or maybe a bit higher, 40 lumen or so. I know they do this to meet the advertised "4 hour" runtime, but that's kinda disappointing.
The other bad news is that when the Eneloop I was using got down to about 1 volt or less, the light wouldn't re-fire after being turned off. Had to wait till the voltage increased a little more. So, be warned. There was no obvious indication that the battery was depleted; I thought maybe the switch was acting flaky when I tried to change modes and it wouldn't come back on.
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Now to get weird!!
The tail of the body is female threaded (recessed), so I started looking around to see if maybe another flashlight body would screw into it to allow multiple batteries (the threads are bare, so it only has to make contact, not screw all the way in).
A Fenix L1D would just go in one thread, as I think it's different pitch. I stuck two AA Eneloops in there and checked the current flow with a multimeter: About 0.4 amps! (vs ~ 1 amp with a single AA). Interesting. It appears to be regulating the extra voltage.
Then I tried THIS:
The Quark 2xAA body screwed all the way in, but the threads are loosey-goosey. Like they are same pitch but slightly different spacing. Now before I go on, I should mention that the tailcap on the Quark won't screw on because the three batteries protrude out too far. So this isn't actually functional, this is just
for science!
I put in 3 AA and put the meter in series: About 1.3 to 1.4 amps! It seemed to be holding fairly steady there for a short time anyway. Maybe it was going direct drive since the amp draw was greater than before??
I don't remember if anyone has tried yet, but it looks like this light
might work on a single Li-Ion cell. It would need to be protected though to avoid draining it down too far by accident. Try at your own risk however!! I don't have a Li-Ion in the AA size so I don't know if that'll fry it or not.
Pretty interesting, anyway.