Finally got the three I ordered on Friday. :shakehead The instruction sheet on all three have the incorrect directions for exiting lockout mode. FWIW, these all came from the original Battery Junction pre-order which was delayed by several weeks. The S/N's are between 21205835200xx and 21205835202xx, with one from each group of 100 (one 0xx, one 1xx, and one 2xx).
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ALL three exhibit the bezel gap shown a few pages back. Also, ALL three have the head rattle (no batteries installed, switch held down). I am confident that this is NOT the switch as the Sysmax rep has told us. INSTEAD, I am pretty confident (and a bit concerned) that it is the
REFLECTOR which is rattling around inside of the head. :green: :sick2:
On one of the lights (1xx), you can actually see the reflector moving around just the
tiniest bit inside of the head when you look at it out in the daylight. Without removing the bezel, I can't confirm this 100%, but I'd say that I am 95% confident that this is what is rattling, which seems unfortunate. This tells me that the reflector is machined to fit tightly inside the head, but that they have not put any pressure on it to hold it in place (no foam, no sticky). This
might be intentional, as it does not seem to affect beam quality whatsoever, but until they say otherwise we will not know for sure.
Finally, all three of them have the funny 3 minute-delayed tacticool decoy mode previously mentioned.
Having said all of that, I am pretty happy with the light overall!!
The CW's I have are a nice clean white color, but toward the edge of the spill they do exhibit a slight purplish hue.
It can be seen why the spill is this color if you carefully look into the side of the reflector from the opposite side of the light with it turned on low. Hold the light out in front of you at about eye level, turn it on low, and shine it up at the ceiling. Slowly lower the light and look into the far side of the reflector. Once you get it to the correct level (where the very edge of the spill is in your eyes), you will see a reflection of the LED which appears to be
diffracted by the slight machine marks in the reflector, and the reflection shows up in the violet through deep blue color range (the machine marks act as a type of diffraction grating, and the spacing of these lines determines the color reflected). That is my scientific explanation anyway. :duh2: I don't think that the lens coating has anything to do with it, but I
could be wrong. :shrug: If you start to tip the light toward yourself (carefully!!!), just before the LED comes into view this diffraction will coalesce into a brighter spot where the colors are more apparent and go into the lighter blue range.
Anyway, these EA4's seem pretty hard to beat for the money and the fact that they only use 4 AA batteries!
oo: I'm happy with my purchase even with the minor issues they seem to have (really, these are just nitpicks).