Quark, Strangeness And Charm

As mentioned on this blog previously I am a self confessed ‘flashlight whore’. I’ve not done an audit for a long time and I don’t really care to either as I may even shock myself, lets just say I most likely own too many flashlights…

Doing lots of underground shots presents its own lighting problems, one of which is colour temperature. These new fangled LED’s although wonderfully bright seem to produce a very blue beam which tends to make the pictures suck. This issue gets further compounded when I use two or more different lights to paint a shot as you end up with differing ‘blueness’. Of course this all gets fixed later in post as I have to even up the Colour Temperature but what if you could get a flashlight with a ‘neutral’ temperature…?

The theory was to try something from the wonderful people at 4Sevens as they are a company started and run by a self confessed Flashaholic called David Chow who produced a Limited Edition run of Cool, Warm and Neutral temperature lights. Most of these are now discontinued but luckily I managed to pick up a 4Sevens Quark RGB Neutral White from Led Fire Torches.

The 4Sevens Quark RGB Neutral White also has another neat feature (the clue is in the name!!) and that’s a quad die emitter so it has a different colour in each corner (white, red, green, and blue) so I get to kill two birds with one stone:

A) Have a nice neutral light to paint with underground.
B) Try some Troy Paiva type stuff using the coloured die.

Quark RGB Neutral White specs:

Length: 4.8 in
Diameter: 0.86 in
Weight: 1.8 oz (without batteries)
Finish: Type-III hard-anodized aircraft-grade aluminum
Batteries: 2 CR123A

(All lumen outputs are COOL WHITE, Out-the-front)

    * Moonlight: 0.4 lm, 650 hours, 1 ma
    * Low: 2.8 lm, 130 hours, 10 ma
    * Med: 15.0 lm, 25 hours, 50 ma
    * High: 58.4 lm, 7.5 hours, 250 ma
    * Turbo: 150 lm, 2 hours, 700 ma
    * SOS: 22.5 hours
    * Strobe: 4 hours
    * Beacon: 20 hours

From 4Sevens:

The Quark RGB features a CREE MCE-RGB emitter. The MCE-RGB is a quad-die emitter that features a different color for each corner of the die: white, red, green, and blue!

The Quark RGB UI is unique. When the head is tightened, it is always white (or neutral white depending on your model). When the head is loosened, it is one of the RGB colors. Cycling between loose and tight will toggle through the three colors.

The way to change modes is similar to the regular Quarks. Just tap the tail button to change modes (or just turn it on and off within 3-4 seconds). It will toggle between eight modes: moonlight -> low -> medium -> high -> max -> S.O.S -> strobe -> beacon.

Additionally, it will remember the last mode used even after you turn off the flashlight. It will also remember which mode you used in both the tightened and loosened state as well as which color was used in the loosened mode.

As soon as I get the chance I will be out testing this new toy 🙂

Ask My Flashlight

I’m not going to own up to how many flashlights I own as I’m a self confessed Flashlight Whore and just can’t resist the lure of something different. I don’t ‘need’ them all, just every now and again something catches my eye and I just have to own it. The last time such things seduced me was the Thrunite Catapult V2 which as it happens is earning its keep very well at the moment on a weekly basis due to a massive underground playground that I’m currently exploring.

The latest score was yet another Underwater Kinetics flashlight. Underwater Kinetics have been firm favourites of mine for decades and I’ve had various colours of Mini Q40’s strapped to my Caving helmet since 1989. Their product is virtually unbeaten and can be seen in use with Fire Departments and Rescue Teams the world over, as well as their biggest market – Dive Lights.

Mini Q40

Also amongst my UK collection is an eLED Vizion Headlamp which is my EDC headtorch….you know, just in case 😉

Vizion

Anyway, the latest acquisition is a UK2AAA Xenon Mini Pocket Light  which has been looking at me seductively for a few weeks at my friendly neighbourhood (online) dive shop. Anyway, it showed up today and I must say its neat and it’s gonna get promoted to my exploring bag immediately as some sort of backup light...

Big Guns – New Toys…

We went somewhere very BIG recently so I fancied taking some serious ‘firepower’ with me for light painting and general all roundnosiness, we were bristling with a variety of stuff anyway like variousLenser’s,Petzls,SureFires, Underwater Kinetics andSpeleoTechnics but I was still hankering for something silly, off the scale and OTT so I splashed for aThrunite CatapultV2…The Thrunite CatapultV2 is a revised version of the existing Catapult but with a redesigned driver. It’s a genuine 1000 out the front lumens on high due to the totally insane Luminus SST-50 LED.

You can run a variety of different batteries (CR123, 18650 or 17670) as it comes with two battery tubes.Its designed for Search & Rescue so as a result it falls into the ‘Long Range Thrower’ category so take care if you want to use this for close up light painting cos it kicks ass and has quite a tight beam!!!Physically it seems bomb proof and it has IPX-8 Water & Dust Resistance, I certainly dropped it many times during the day and didn’t notice any ill effects.

This is a SERIOUS flashlight but is not cheap…