Has anyone tried the coast px22? I got one for under $10 and bought 3 more for wife and friends. Walmart was selling them and had them in a locked display case. Does 43 lumens on low for four hours and fifteen minutes compaired to the solitaire's 47 lumens for 1.5--2 hours. On high it does 100 lumens for an hour and a half. It has a sealed tail cap clicky switch and comes with a good clip. It also has a pronounced hotspot. Seems like a good value for the price. What do yall think?
It's unregulated, so while it's a good budget alternative to other aaa lights, you'd probably want to stick an eneloop in there to get actual runtimes (albeit much shorter) at whatever prescribed brightness it is. I actually believe maglite's 1.5 hour runtime over the coast at 4.5 hours, unless you could give us some real world testing (and not specs sheet numbers).
My basis for this? An olight i3e runs for under an hour at 90 lumens, so at half the lumens, you could hypothetically get double the runtime, about 1h45m, which the (unofficial unit of lumenhours) is roughly 85 lumen hours out of an AAA on the solitair, and roughly the same on the olight i3e. Notice that "ansi/fl 1 standard" crap, which means the light just has to be at or above 10% of the rated runtime, regardless of how quickly the light drops to that 10%. If it really DID run 100lm at 1.75hrs, that's 175 lumen hours, about DOUBLE the runtime of EVERY single AAA in existence, and they would be able to LEGITIMATELY charge their pre-scruples pricing like they used to, i.e. the p7 and t7, $60 back when a $25 jetbeam outclassed it on features and runtime was INSANE.
So, while it's a great budget, well-knurled AAAalternative that also has a clicky switch, I feel like it's in the same vein, if not slightly inferior to my Bushnell AAA which uses the same BS exploit of the ANSI standards for marketing purposes.
On an eneloop AAA, my Bushnell AAA runs for just under an hour, starting at about 100ish lumens and slowly tapering to about 70 stable lumens over the course of 35 minutes, then another taper down to about 40 lumens over 15 minutes until it just shuts off.
