Zebralight SC51Fw "Floody" Flashlight

Concept: 5 out of 5
Execution: 4 out of 5
Yeah, but: It's only the best most of the time.

The Long Version: High-output LED lights have revolutionized flashlights, and in the past few years there's been a proliferation of mil-spec tactical lights that boast about being able to blind people at close distances. Fantastic. But what good is it to have a torch that can throw a ten-foot disk of light the length of a football field when I'm just trying to find a pair of shoes in the back of the closet? Being bright is over-rated.

The Zebralight is one of an emerging new design of flashlights with variable brightness levels, making them useful for more tasks than search and rescue. Their SC51 family are small flashlights that pull an amazing amount of light out of a single AA battery. Optimized for the new generation of slow-discharge NiMH batteries with exceptional shelf life, they'll run at high power for almost an hour. But if that's not right for the job, they have five other power levels, and the low settings let the light last for days. All of this is controlled by different clicks of its single button.

It's a little unusual to need instructions to work a flashlight, but the important thing to know is that a quick click of the button starts it on high power. Holding the button a little longer when turning the light on – the trick is to not over-think it – starts it at its lower power setting. Holding the button down longer, even when it's already on, makes the light cycle through its three main power settings – with two memorized outputs each – starting from the low position.

Physically, the Zebralight is a small light with an oversized heat-sink for a head, a removable pocket clip attached to a non-removable mount, and its anodized aluminum finish is a subtly greenish-grey colour. The heat-dispersing fins aren't exactly sharp, but they're simply machined straight into the head without any sort of rounded edges.

I already have a handfull of long-throw lights, so I picked the SC51Fw "Floody" design. This takes the beauty of a variable-output light even farther by giving it a frosted lens that gently diffuses its light across a wide beam with just a subtle hotspot. It's not a true flood with completely even output – Zebralight makes those in a headlamp style – but it really is much more, well, "floody" than a standard flashlights' beam. Maglight popularized the focusable beam that can throw a dimmer but wider hotspot, which hints at the utility of a flood beam, but the reality is much more effective and useful.

While it still throws a smoothly weighted cone of light, the Zebralight Floody has a beam that looks more like a portable desk lamp than a spotlight. Click on the "photo" link after the name of each flashlight to see larger comparison images taken with the same settings (40mm-e, 1/4s, iso800, f/2.8, daylight white balance) for the SC51Fw (photo), Pelican 7060 (review / photo), and Pelican 2410 (review / photo). The far corner of that scary underground room, which is roughly in the middle of the frame, is about forty feet from the camera.

It turns out that flashlight power is fairly tricky to measure. I created a rig that put the flashlight into a sealed box, with the lens a fixed distance from one end, and then used a photographic light meter to measure the light bouncing out from a hole on the opposite end. There are some problems with it; for one thing the box is wood, so the warm light of the Zebralight's warmish 'neutral' bulb will be bounced more efficiently than the cooler blues of the other LEDs. While my results were quite consistent and repeatable, other errors certainly could and undoubtedly have crept in. But it's as fair a system as I could devise for comparing a flood to a narrow beam, as the focusable Filzer I-Beam flashlight measured essentially identical output no matter what lens setting it used. The following chart uses the EV scale, so a difference of "1" indicates doubling or halving the light output and creates a noticeable difference in illumination. A difference of 2 is four times the output, three is eight times, and so on.

MEASURED POWER OUTPUT • LOWEST TO HIGHEST

Gerber Infinity Ultra – 5.2

Pelican 2410 Recoil – 7.1

Princeton Tec Amp 1.0 – 7.2

Filzer I-Beam X4 – 8.4w / 8.5t

Leatherman S2 Serac 6.6l / 9.0h

Pelican 7060 – 9.7

Zebralight SC51Fw – 10.4

While some of those results seem a little screwy – I never would have expected the "high" setting of the Leatherman S2 to rank so well – they're fairly indicative of each light's basic abilities. When I was in doubt I'd shine two lights against the nearby wall and see which one drowned out the other, and in each case I was satisfied with the results. But that doesn't mean that I'd pick the Leatherman over the LAPD-issue 7060 when exploring a dark alley. Remember that these numbers are close-distance measurements and I've tried to remove beam quality and pattern from the results.

(Quick bonus review: The Filzer X4 light runs on two AA batteries for eight hours, gives quite an impressive output, and has a focusable beam. It also costs half of what the Zebralight does. If you like the venerable 2xAA Maglite size, but want something much brighter with a tail switch, it's worth a serious look.)

The best lights for real-world use will vary depending on the beam style. As the previous sample photo links show, the Floody smoothly lights a vast volume at the expense of peak brightness and range. The Pelican 7060 throws a huge amount of light in a fairly limited direction, so I can bounce it off of a white celling and light up a small room. Testing under these conditions kept the order of the results unchanged except that it knocked the Floody down one spot to rank below the 7060, and it was noticeably easier to read the LCD display of the light meter with the big Pelican light. (The Filzer's variable beam on the wide setting also performed much less impressively than its tight beam setting, measuring one full EV darker.) Of course the bounce trick doesn't work as well if the room has a dark ceiling, and if I was really trying to light up a room with the Floody, then I'd just point it where I want to look.

I need to take a moment and point out how ridiculous it is that I'm even comparing this Zebralight to the two Pelican torches. The 2410 Recoil light takes four AA batteries, and the 7060 runs on a proprietary 3.7V 2200 mAh Lithium-Ion pack. Both pelican lights do have a longer burn time (1.5h for the 7060, 7h for the 2410) than the 50 minutes that the SC51Fw is rated for, but the Zebralight is doing it all on a single 1.2V rechargeable AA. It's also worth noting that the Floody-White LED version is the least powerful member of the SC51 family – their 'normal' model, with the clear lens and a bluish LED, is rated considerably brighter.

The flood pattern isn't perfect for everything, but at high power it's great for using at distances shorter than twenty feet, and good out to forty or fifty. Beyond that a more traditional pattern from a powerful light will be better. A less powerful light – which most hardware-store lights will be – won't give much more throw than the Floody, but with a considerably less useful spill pattern. The Floody actually has enough usable beam to let me use peripheral vision when I'm exploring a dark warehouse, so there are fewer scary haunted-house shadows shifting and jumping around.

In the city there's so much light around us all of the time that a flashlight needs to be bright just to be seen, which means that lower power levels aren't appreciated as much. But they are very handy to have when there's time to adapt to the lower light levels; even the brighter of the medium settings will run all night if you have no choice but to keep walking through the forest. Working at close quarters, like when changing a fuse or looking for shoes, the dimmer settings do make the Zebralight much more pleasant to use. It takes some practice to master the "slow click" that turns on the lowest power tier, but it's worth the effort because they're the second-most useful setting.

In fact, my biggest criticism of the Floody light is that its lowest low power setting is too bright to use with dark-adapted vision, or at least that I can't use it in the dark (such as an intercity bus at night or in a movie theatre) without it being obnoxious for the people around me. But then that's also true about the LCD on my phone. Its rated output of 0.3 lumens seems trivial, and sometimes I need to look at the lens to see if the light is on, but it's enough to read with at night and the battery will last for weeks.

The SC51 family is made in China, and ships directly from their facility there. Mine was posted promptly and then took a month to arrive, but at least worldwide shipping is included in the prices on their website. Currently selling at 64USD, they're more expensive than any of the lights that I compared it to except for the Pelican 2410 (tie) and Pelican 7060, which costs vastly more. But it's also the only one with the sophisticated controls that let it run at different power levels, has a regulator to keep a constant output, and throws far more light than a torch this size has any excuse for.

I have to admit that I'm smitten by both the Zebralight and the flood pattern. To have a single AA in a light that rivals some of my biggest, which are driven by four times the power, is astonishing. To have one light be bright enough to change a flat tire on a moonless night, and then dim enough to read a map in the passenger's seat without blinding the driver, is incredibly useful. If I could only have one flashlight – perish the thought! – the Zebralight Floody would be the one I would choose for most of the scenarios I could reasonably face. The times that need more brightness at a distance will still call for a light like the Pelican 7060, but that could conceivably be replaced by another pocket-sized single-AA Zebralight SC51. Amazing.

The only thing that has stopped me from ordering a second Zebralight is a little counterintuitive: the SC51Fw is so impressive that I'm likely to wait and see what they can come up with next. New LEDs have made a huge difference over just the past couple of years, and there's no reason why that's going to stop now. Until then I have my collection of other lights, but I'll keep reaching for my little Floody first.

last updated 16 apr 2011

Filzer Dynamo Front 3 LED Cycling Light

Concept: 3 out of 5
Execution: 2 out of 5
Yeah, but: A disposable price that doesn't need disposable batteries.

The Long Version: I have a thing for lights, and a thing for bike accessories. I also have a thing against buying batteries - small, recurring costs bug me. So when I found this little hand-cranked dynamo bike light, I knew I was going to give it a try.

I haven't been using it long enough to have a good sense of the durability of the Filzer Dynamo, but it seems well-built and has a nice and slightly grippy surface. The light itself is modest with a blue tint, which is good for making the bike visible at night, but isn't going to light the cyclist's way. Personally, I like my lights bright enough that they help my visibility during the day. Canadian cars and trucks have their lights on all the time, and if it helps a six-fool-wide multi-ton vehicle get noticed, I don't see how it can hurt skinny little me.

Mountain Equipment Co-Op sells this light for $8.75. It's hard to beat that price, especially since it has a built-in rechargeable battery. So the fact that it isn't the brightest bulb isn't really unexpected. It's far, far, far better than nothing, which is exactly what it's likely to replace for most bikes. If the batteries run down they can be fixed faster than a flat tire. For more serious lighting needs - getting my arse hit by a car is an ongoing concern of mine - I'd suggest getting a brighter battery light to use in combination with this one. When I have the second light I can foresee adding a diffuser material to the Dynamo to increase its visibility from the sides.

One of the interesting things about the three LED dynamo light is that it feels really nice to hold. It has an oval profile, and the crank handle folds back into the body when it's not in use. Frankly, it makes a pretty decent flashlight for general use, and it's so cheap that there's no reason not to have one around. Ah, if only it was that easy.

The Dynamo light comes with a really big caveat: the batteries self-discharge, and if they're allowed to stay discharged, then they won't hold power any more. If that happens, then this eco-friendly fossil-fuel-free-transportation-enabler is heading for the local landfill. That's got to be the height of counter-productive irony. It also means that this can't just be put in a glove compartment or emergency kit until it's needed. You'll also need to take it off the bike and occasionally crank it while the bike's in storage over the winter. No problem, of course - as I mentioned before, it does double duty as a flashlight... except that the streamlined shape that's so comfortable to hold makes it too bulky to put in anything less than a coat pocket.

The Filzer 3-LED dynamo is a good light: not the brightest, but not the most expensive either. Every bike should definitely have a light, and if the care and feeding of the dynamo sounds acceptable, then there's no reason why it shouldn't be this one. Riding an unlit bike is inexcusably stupid when there's such a cheap and serviceable light on the market.

The Two-Week Update: Some additional use has shown me one more trait of this light. I still consider it to be a decent-if-modest light, but I've noticed that it rattles. Not much, and not loudly, but it bugs me. I may be over-sensitive, but now when I know that I'm not going to be riding during or after dusk, I'll leave it at home or carry it in my bike bag.

Pelican 7060 LED Flashlight

Concept: 4 out of 5
Execution: 5 out of 5
Yeah, but: This is the first time I've seriously considered a perfect 5/5 rating.

The Long Version: In 2004 the Los Angeles Police Department had a problem: their standard-issue 2-pound Maglite flashlights were too heavy and expensive to keep using. By the spring of 2007 Pelican had turned the LAPD's requirements for a new light into a shipping product: the 7060 LED. To save everyone a lot of reading, I'll say it now: this is by far the best flashlight that I've ever used.

Here's the rest of the quick version: It's regulated with a flat 90 minute run time, incredibly bright, large but not outrageous, has two switches, and is rechargeable.

Meet the Family:

The photo above shows my collection of 'serious' lights. On the far left, giving off the lovely orange light, is my trusty 2xAA Mini Maglite. Mine was already an old light when I found it in a parking lot twelve years ago; this model is often the first "good" light people buy. For this photo it's using a pair of freshly-charged Eneloops batteries. To the right of it is my Pelican M6 2330 LED, a model that uses a pair of 3V CR123A batteries, and these cost so much that I don't keep a spare set on hand. On other side of the same coin, the batteries cost so much that I barely use the light, so they're probably still fairly fresh. Next to it is my 2410 "Stealthlight" - yes, the bright yellow one - that I reviewed here. It's also using freshly charged Eneloops, but it takes four of them. And finally, on the far right, is the 7060 LED. All of these lights have their bezels 18" from the seamless paper that forms the background, so there's no trickery involved in this photo. The 7060 really is that much brighter than the rest of the group.

There's no perfect do-everything flashlight, just as there's no one perfect camera, car, or pair of shoes. There are some that are better in each broad category, but I won't be attaching my Pelican 7060 to my keychain and I wouldn't explore a dark building with a Pelican L1 or a Gerber Infinity Ultra, which are the lights on the far left of the photo above. But if I had bought the 7060 first, it and the Gerber would be the only two flashlights that I'd own. The LAPD's 7060 is far superior to the M6 unless I really need a light that will fit in a pocket, and it's only second to the 2410 for one specific task that I rarely need. (More on that later.) The maglite has only sentimental value.

Like the kids from my high school, flashlights that are bigger aren't necessarily brighter: it all comes down to what's driving the lamp. So the fact that the 7060 dwarfs the rest of the family and that it's the brightest is a bit of a coincidence. If having a smaller size is a serious factor, you can probably find lights that use the same Cree 3W LED as the 7060 but with a more compact power supply and construction. I'll leave that as an exercise for interested buyers, because last time I did serious flashlight comparison on-line, I wound up buying the most expensive light I've ever owned.

And With That, Back to the Light:

Compared to the centre of the beam, the corona isn't particularly bright. But if you're close enough to what you're lighting that the spot is too narrow to use, then there's going to be plenty of brightness in the spill of the beam. The composite photo above gives a good impression of the brightness of the light overall. The inset image is shot at -4EV - which is recording only 1/16 as much light, or 6.25% for the metric types - and shows the ringed pattern of the beam better. There's actually three separate levels of intensity, with the width of the main beam being 10% of the throw distance, a dimmer corona being 30%, and the total spill being about 60% of the throw. If you light a wall that's ten feet away, the centre is 1' across, the brighter corona is 3' across, and the total spread is 6'. Neat.

A lot of other reviews have made a big deal about how far the 7060 throws its light, and it's very true. If you're doing serious research into this light, believe whatever the other reviews tell you. If you have a more casual interest, it's probably enough for me to say that I can put a decent spot of light on the roof of a grocery store that's at least 250m away. It's not a searchlight, but it might let me know if someone's actually stealing that car when its alarm goes off sixteen floors below in the middle of the night.

If you read as many flashlight reviews as it takes me to decide to buy a new light, you'll quickly learn that almost every LED light is said to have a "white" beam. To a normal person this is true, but I'm a photographer. The photo above is a composite of two calibration shots taken on a neutral grey target. The left-hand side is the light from the LAPD's Pelican 7060, and on the right is the effect of the Recoil 2410. (They are metered differently and can not be used to compare brightness.) The stripe running across the middle of the photo shows what a true daylight-balanced light source would be. It's a little hard to see in this small photo, and most monitors are free spirits when it comes to colour reproduction anyway, so trust me when I say that both the Pelican 7060 and 2410 are tinted green. The 2410 is a little more blue and a little less green (6050K, +25 magenta) than the 7060 (6000K, +29 magenta) which gives it a slight advantage.

So colour-critical photography is the only time that I might reach for my Pelican 2410 instead of the 7060, although the power difference might be a bigger consideration in actual use. But it's worth noting that both of these lights are passing pretty strict standards to even be considered. My M6 has only a slightly visbile green tint, but it's so not-white that it's essentially unusable (6300K, +40 magenta) for my photography. And the M6 is far better than my old 4xAA Princeton Tec "Impact XL" LED. There's a reason why the Impact isn't in the family photo - as the green sheep, it has wandered off and I can't be bothered to look for it. But once again: for normal use by a normal person there's little or no functional difference. The tint issues that are critical to photography probably wouldn't even be visible to someone who isn't attuned to looking for it.

About The Construction:

There's a certain irony to the original LAPD mandate of designing a flashlight that can't be used to beat people up. The 7060 is still a hefty light, and certainly feels tough enough that it could do some damage. The grip is very good, and the balance point of the flashlight is almost at the front switch, making it top-heavy. Add the aluminum heat-sink to the equation and I have no problem imagining some out-of-court settlements. Perhaps the LAPD and/or Pelican forgot that the Monadnock PR-24 baton that Rodney King made famous is also made from plastic?

Even with all of the comparison photos that I've seen, I was still surprised by the size of this light when I first took it out of the box. The black ABS plastic body doesn't have sex appeal of finely machined metal, which would have both reduced the case's diameter and allowed a smaller heat-sink, but its larger size makes it a better tool even though it makes it a worse toy. I was also surprised at the weight of it, since it being called 'light' is in comparison to a 3D Maglite, but others that I've handed it to have been surprised at how little it weighs. Regardless, this isn't a flashlight that gets tucked in a pocket. Pelican does include a souvenir belt holster, which might be useful for someone who rarely plans on carrying their light this way, but I've already lost mine. When I need to take it out of the house I'll just add it to the bag that I usually carry to work, which has a pocket just right for the 7060, or include it with my various camera gear.

The two bright spots below the head of the flashlight are the terminals for the recharging dock. The charger is a grey plastic that doesn't match the look of the 7060, and is designed to be wall- or vehicle-mounted. To keep the light in place in a bouncing squad car the charger must need a very tight grip on the light, and as a result it will scratch the body of the light no matter how carefully it's inserted and removed. The Pelican video shows it being snapped into place; other advice I've seen says to carefully slide the light down into the cradle. Neither works, but snapping it in is easier. It's a tool, so a few scuffs don't bother me.

The last point that's worth noting about the Pelican 7060's construction is that it has two independent on/off switches, both of which allow momentary-on control. I find that I use the one on the body more than the one on the tail, but it's certainly nice to have both. Now whenever I use my 2410 (body) or 2330 (tail) I wonder why they weren't designed with two switches. It seems like such a natural idea now that somebody's done it, but I couldn't imagine why it would be useful until I tried it.

And Finally:

Perfect marks are very hard to get around here: a score of 2 out of 5 is for something that's decent and serviceable, with a lofty "3" being reserved for something I really respect. To get a ranking of "4" requires an exceptional idea or a near-flawless execution. I'd really like to find something that gets a truly perfect score, and the 7060 comes very close, but it lacks that final spark of brilliance to put it over the edge. I'm honestly not sure what a 5/5 product will look like, but I think I'll know it when I see it. Until then, I have only the most minor complaints about what is otherwise a flawless light.

Pelican Recoil 2410 LED Flashlight

Concept: 4 out of 5
Execution: 4 out of 5
Yeah, but: Great light, good price, but it could still be better.

The Long Version: The interesting thing about the Pelican StealthLite Recoil LED 2410PL Flashlight isn't the marketing department's 90's throwback to groovy Stealth technology. (I'm not sure exactly what a 'stealth light' would look like, but it would probably emit infrared and not be bright yellow.) Instead you should pay attention to the word "Recoil," which means that the Pelican 2410 has a bright 1-watt LED immediately behind the lens that is turned to fire backwards into the reflector. Picture a satellite dish with a bulb shining into the dish from the tip of the receiver, and imagine it beaming light back into space instead of gathering weak signals from it. What you get is a tightly focused - collimated - beam coming from a reflector that's not compromised by having the light source poking through the middle of it.

The weak yellow light in the photo-illustration above is coming from a two-double-A Mini Maglite (without the Nite Ize LED upgrade), and the strong light is from the Pelican 2410. The 'orange-peel' textured reflector design is so good that the light thrown is in a square, matching the shape of the LED. This gives the flashlight a very long throw for a light using modest AA bateries, but at the expense of very little corona to light the periphery of the beam. Pelican rates the output at 32 lumens, which I have to trust because I can't measure it myself and am not really sure what it means. But it does sound pretty impressive, especially compared to the AA MiniMag's 5.3 lumens.

The 2410 runs on four AA batteries, and the body has a flat cross-section that makes it very easy to carry in a pack or tuck in a back pocket, albeit with the head protruding. Its plastic body comes in black or yellow; the "PL" version that I have costs a few extra dollars but has the glow-in-the-dark bezel that makes the light easy to find when it's off. I highly recommend it. It's also submersible, pressure-rated to 500 feet, and resists all kinds of chemicals that I wouldn't want to have splashed on me anyway. The plastic-bodied Pelican lights are occasionally derided by those who prefer more "milspec" designs, which may be why Pelican chose the macho name for its reversed-LED design. But no matter what it's called, this light's bright yellow case, glow-in-the-dark bezel, and plastic body that can't be used as a weapon isn't going to please those who wish they were Special Ops troopers. Get over it. The Pelican Recoil 2410PL is a great functional light, so pretend you're a Fire or EMS rescue worker instead. It's a more humane mental space to be in, anyway.

It's a sad truth: flashlights can be bright, small, and long-lasting, but they can't be all three at once. The Recoil 2410 is both larger and dimmer than my Pelican M6 2330 LED, at the bottom of the photo above, but the M6 also uses a pair of 3V lithium batteries that cost $15 a set and lasts about four hours before it drops below its rated 41 lumens. The hardware-store favourite AA Maglite at the top of the photo is also smaller and perhaps a little more stylish than the 2410, but is nowhere near its output. What all of these lights lack - but my little $40 Gerber has - is a regulator. This is a piece of circuitry that evens out the battery power so that the light output stays consistent for most of the battery life. It's a neat feature. If Pelican added that ability to a similar light I would consider buying it as well, and would certainly recommend it over the current design.

But it's also worth noting that this light is somewhat specialized. I have many flashlights, of varying power and cost, and this is the one that throws a narrow beam of light very far and is so cheap to feed that I'll use it without worrying about its run time. (I actually use Eneloops rechargeables in it, so it costs nothing and lasts nearly forever.) It's too large for every day carry, so it's unlikely to be the light that you always have on you. It's too bright to light up a mixing board in a dark club or to read a sheet of paper while doing a presentation with an LCD projector. But it's great for "penetrating darkness," as another reviewer wrote, which is what I use it for. I bought this light with the excuse that I can use it for photography, both for being able to compose and focus for available-darkness images, and to use it for 'painting with light'. Normal people might want to keep one in the car for emergencies, or on the bedside table for prowlers.

For a brighter all-purpose light, it can't beat the lights that run on multiple CR123A batteries, like my M6. General keychain and task lighting falls to either my Pelican L1 or my Gerber Infinity Ultra, which are modest lights with soft beams. But if I could only have one light that had to do everything, the Pelican 2410 is the one I would choose. The powerful light with good running time from inexpensive batteries is too good to pass up, and it's a worthwhile addition to any kit.

Updated 2 July 2008: I'm my own worst enemy. In researching this review - I do that sometimes - I found another flashlight that I want to add to my collection. It has many of the features that I love about my Peli 2410, such as the light carrying weight and nice clean light colour, but blows it (and my M6 2330 LED) away in brightness, throw, operating cost, and convenience. And I have a birthday coming up soon. So look for a couple more flashlight reviews this month: the as-yet-unidentified purchase, and my M6 before I send it to Craigslist.

Updated Again 17 July 2008: My review of the new light, a Pelican 7060, can be found here. It's a light so good that it has almost retired my 2410.

Mini MagLite LED Upgrade Combo by Nite Ize

Concept: 4 out of 5
Execution: 3 out of 5
Yeah, but: We'll see how it holds up.

The Long Version: I'm a sound engineer for rock bands, so dark nightclubs are my "office" and a flashlight is not just handy to have, it's absolutely vital.
For almost 20 years the 2xAA Mini MagLite has been my choice, and a large percentage of musicians and techs concur mostly due to the excellent build quality for the price.
The LED revolution has impacted MagLite's market dominance with brighter lights that don't kill batteries nearly as fast, and MagLite has finally fought back with LED versions of their old favorites as well as LED replacement bulbs, but at premium prices.

An alternative I'm enjoying is by Nite Ize, a maker of many useful flashlight accessories.
It consists of a 3-LED bulb section, a matching reflector, plus a tail cap switch.
The tail cap switch is important to me because without it the Mini MagLite requires two hands to operate. Like a gun, when you really need light you need it fast, and quite often my other hand is busy with the sound mixer or light board, a beer, etc.
I really love this part of the upgrade kit and in fact had been using a different flashlight for the past year because of it's tail cap switch, but found it too bulky in my back pocket for comfort. The MagLite fits into the space next to my wallet very nicely, with the head sticking out so I can grab it easily.

As for the LED part of the kit, installation is a breeze as long as you're aware that the LED module is polarity sensitive--if it doesn't work just turn it 180 degrees so the pins swap holes.
What kind of improvement can you expect?
The LED upgrade is maybe 40% brighter (a quick estimate) and also tends more towards the blue spectrum than the original incandescent bulb as seen in this daylight-balanced photo.
More importantly, the light is also much more uniform and you no longer have to bother turning the flashlight's head to focus the beam, which saves time.

The LED conversion is available separately for around $5, while this kit goes for $10 at Target and WalMart but only $7 at Academy, making it a steal.
My only complaint is that the tail cap switch feels a little flimsy; the button rattles around in it's housing in both on and off positions.
Having used it for only two nights, durability is a big question mark but I'll be sure to update this review should any problems arise--for now I carry the original tail cap in my toolbox just in case.
I've had the LED conversion in one of my MagLites for two years and it's still going strong.



Note, and I quote: "Replacing the original components with the Nite Ize Upgrade components will void the Mag instrument LIMITED LIFETIME WARRANTY covering the AA Mini Maglite flashlight.
Made in China"


My thanks to Matthew for inviting me onto this site. I'm already having lots of fun with it and look forward to reviewing more of the things that are important to me for one reason or another. Keep in mind that I'm always after a killer deal and carefully weigh price versus performance. This will play a big part in my future reviews of items such as vodka, computer monitors, collectible toys and food.

Update!
I quit using this flashlight a few months ago.
The LED conversion seems to have a connection problem somewhere, and despite my best efforts at fixing it the light would dim or go out until I gave it a good whack. I'm a sound and light engineer and KNOW about fixing bad connections, so have concluded that there's a design or materials flaw somewhere.