Advice on dive lights for my advanced course

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

I'm not a fan of the D26 only because finding quality 26650 batteries is very difficult. I refuse to allow any battery with "fire" in the name in my house or anywhere near anything important, and there aren't a lot of 26650's out there without "fire" in the name.
I'll stick to 18650's and know that i'm using quality cells and sacrifice some burn time. An hour on high is more than enough for most diving and anything that I need significantly more burn time for will use a canister

Follow-up: I tested all 4 of my Soshine 26650 batteries that are about 7 months old. The lowest one still tested over 5100mAh. The highest was about 5250. I am still very happy with these batteries. Especially at $25 for 4.
 
Follow-up: I tested all 4 of my Soshine 26650 batteries that are about 7 months old. The lowest one still tested over 5100mAh. The highest was about 5250. I am still very happy with these batteries. Especially at $25 for 4.

Mine are in the exact same boat and the reason I went with the D26. Very good dive lights.
 
Soshine 5500mAh 26650 batteries are abundant on eBay. And cheap. Around $25 for 4. Mine have tested around 5300mAh in my Opus charger/tester. I got them at the beginning of last July and they still work just fine.

I just ordered some more today for my new video lights.

4x Soshine 5500mAh 3.7V 26650 Li-ion Rechargeable Battery PCB Protection US G5I3 | eBay

I'll test these when they arrive to make sure they are also good.

I put the 4 new Soshines through a test cycle on my Opus charger/tester and all 4 of the new ones tested at 5100 or higher. Mostly at 5300 or higher.
 
I don't know any names either, but considering the way that so much stuff comes out of China with "Genuine CREE", when CREE doesn't seem to be aware of that production, and the way that so many LED lights in general seem to have lives very much shorter than the 50,000 hour norms, I wouldn't be surprised. Of course compared to mattress companies, all the dive light & equipment makers are upright, honest, and trustworthy.(G)

You can't blame china on this. Cree is a LED diode manufacturer, not a light manufacturer. They of course don't care what light manufactures do with their diode. Do you think gasoline companies or tire companies care what car manufactures do with the gas or tire??

50k hours is a long time. It is 24/7 on for 6 years. For average aggressive dive light kind of usage, it will last 50 years. But that is the life of the diode. When a LED light fail, it is usually not the diode that fail. It is always something else.

As for the inflated Lumen quote, most include American manufactures do that, not just Chinese. About the only few honest manufactures are UWLD, Sola and Halcyon. Way too many over spec

And you understanding of lumen is actually Lux as tbone pointed out
 
Of course you can blame China, although that doesn't make them unique. The issue with China is that in a modern world, they are still operating way behind the times. There's no FTC, no Department of Consumer Affairs, no vigorous or even regular monitoring, control, or punishment of the many vendors who exploit their domestic and export markets. Gluten poisoning in pet food. Poison exported toothpaste. Fake insulin was it? Corruption is rampant and part of that is cultural. For literally millennia, the Chinese (seven totally different nations unified under the sword by one warlord) were told their emperor was a semi-deity descended from the Sun God. And that the Chinese people were semi-holy above all other peoples, who were barbarian part-animals and not fully human at all. (Hardly unique, look at the Inquisition, the Crusades, the decimation of the South Americans by Spain, the Belgians in the Congo, the Intifada today...)
When you've got a thousand years of that mind-set behind your culture, screwing the wide-eyed hairy barbarians who have no recourse and can never come back to you just makes good business sense. Especially when your government rarely gets involved. (Rarely, but I think they did execute the man behind the tainted domestic milk, and from time to time they take other similar poster-boy actions.)
"We" buy from China because we're cheap. And as my friend's old school Irish Catholic Midwest mother used to say, "Bought cheap, paid dearly." Sometimes you roll the dice anyway.
 
How does any of this has to do with dive light that we are talking about here. If you can be objective, Chinese makes very decent dive light these days. Most of the lower cost light and quite highly regard lights, such as, HOG, DRIS, DiveRite, Hollis .. are Chinese made. Most people here are satisfied with their quality.

Sure China does a lot of things wrong per western standard, but not everything wrong in the world is caused by them. Let's be fair. And let's not get into politics, nation policy, trade regulation .... those stuff here. It is not what we are here for
 
Wasn't it the Talking Heads who sang "They Blinded Me With Science!" ? Yeah, that's lumens.
Thomas Dolby if memory serves me correct. ... Yup. Google confirmed it.
 
It just means that a buyer has to make sure to do their homework, check the reviews and ratings, and be a little more cautious in what they are buying. As compared to buying a product made in the UK, or Germany, or Switzerland...or even a US label. At least one of whom has been around for over 40 years and honors their lifetime warranty without complaint.

Obviously, fine goods can be (and sometimes are) made in China.

I only wish I could find a nice genuine Cree emitter to replace the old 6v tractor headlight in my old Ikelite. A wide beam still beats a point source in some ways, but it seems like no one has offered LED replacements for those, at all.
 
Boa sorte, Turko!
 

Back
Top Bottom