A teardown and review of the powerful Skywolfeye Zoomable "5000 lm" Cree LED Flashlight from Ebay for just 2$. I was interested what can I get for just 2$ including shipping. This torch claims to have 5000 lm light output, which is nonsense. For 5000 lm, you need about 30-50W LED. The real power output of this one can be about 200-300 lm with a fully charged battery. It uses a standard 18650 Li-Ion cell, which is of course not included. I was expecting a buck regulator or at least a constant current regulator in it, but actually there's just a resistor in series with the LED :). The listing claims it contains a Cree XM-L T6 LED, but actually it is XP-E. The XP-E LED has a maximum current 1A and a maximum power 3.5W. At 1A, the max light output is 307lm. In this torch, the LED is operated only with a series resistor (0.75 ohm) and with a full battery the current is 0.7A and power is 2.2W. There's a chip, but this chip only changes the 3 modes: Full power, low power (25% duty PWM modulated at 560Hz) and blinking (50% duty at 11Hz). The fast blinking is really annoying, can cause seizures and I consider removing the chip completely. After removing the chip, however, you would lose the low power option. Also, because the chip has some resistance, you would have to increase the series resistor value after removing the chip (to about 150% of original value or 1 - 1.2 ohm). But still, this is a very nice and super bright flashlight, much more powerful than I expected for the size and price, and has a very wide zoom range. It has aluminium body with a black finish. The lens is plastic, but I really didn’t expect glass for the price.
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