This review was originally written for a competition at the Australian Urban Bunker forums.
now the competition's over, i figured i'd post it here for BladeForums.com members.
any feedback much appreciated.
cheers
sambo.
- - - -
Introduction:
Fenix isn't a company I'd heard much about before I spotted their TK-45 model in Ron's 'In Stock' threads.
The promise of '760 retina melting lumens' caught my fancy and I ordered it just prior to Christmas 2010. Other deciding factors included the use of easy-to-acquire AA batteries and the funky three-bulb design.
A bit of net-fu and reading up on Fenix while waiting for the package to arrive led me on a strange journey through the candlepower forums and a few worthwhile reviews on Fenix and their products. They appeared to be fairly well regarded and, from what I could gather, I had a pretty impressive piece of kit on the way.
Physical Attributes:
It comes packed in a rather solid plastic case that, with some modification, I'm sure a resourceful person could find all sorts of other uses for.
Loading up the eight AA Eneloop batteries I power mine with involves unscrewing the back cap. The lighting head assembly unscrews from the other end, leaving a lightweight, hollow aluminium tube to hold the batteries and connect the two ends.
Resistance from the O-ring seals at either end is considerable. Once you remove the cap and see the ring itself, you'll immediately understand why. This thing looks like it'd be more at home on some kind of super high pressure gas bottle, not merely sealing up a torch.
The term 'chunky' comes to mind when looking at the O-rings. Fenix thoughtfully includes a spare set of rings in the case for you to lose. A lanyard is also included with the torch.
The threads themselves are all square cut. For reasons that probably make wonderful and fantastic sense if you take the time to understand why, folk with monumental post-counts at the candlepower forums can get all doo-lally excited by square edged threads on torches. Now I can independently confirm that the threads are indeed square cut, I'll assume a tick of approval here too.
The battery cage has a big spring at the 'goes into the lighting assembly' end. Cells are loaded in pairs and aren't particularly well held in by the cage. This isn't a problem sitting at the kitchen table loading them up, but changing batteries in the back of a bumpy ute could turn into a rather frustrating exercise. Once inside, a shake of the torch and you can feel the cage moving slightly against the spring. A vigorous shake and you can hear the cage rattle inside the body of the torch.
Loaded up, it's not particularly heavy, but it certainly isn't an ultra-lightweight nor super compact item. Without batteries, the TK-45 weighs in at 324 grams.
The LED lights themselves are Cree XP-G R5, each rated for 50,000 hours of use.
The controls consist of two side-by-side buttons the marketing gurus have decided to call 'sidewinder switches'.
There are seven modes of operation. Four levels of continuous output and three beacon modes.
The right side switch basically turns the torch On and Off, but a double-tap off-on sequence engages the flashing beacon modes.
The left side switch controls the intensity or the flashing mode (SOS, strobe and beacon).
The TK45 will turn back on in the last torch mode you used.
I call the four torch modes Low, Medium, High and Ridiculous.
Claimed runtimes from Fenix, using 2,500mAh Ni-MH battery, are:
Low: 8 Lumens, 232 hours.
Medium: 95 Lumens, 22 hours.
High: 312 Lumens, 6.5 hours.
Ridiculous: 760 Lumens, 2 hours. If you leave the torch running in Ridiculous mode, it will switch back down to High after around 45 minutes. You can bump it back up again if needs be.
When operating at Ridiculous power mode, a fair amount of heat is being generated which can be felt by hand in front of the light.
Low (or Moonlight as Fenix calls it) is one bulb lighting up with a low intensity. In a dark house, this mode provides plenty of light to see short distances of around 5m. Fumbling around in a tent, this is all you would ever need unless you were reading. If you turn off the light and back on in Low, the bulb being used cycles. Theoretically, if you only ever use this mode, you would get some 150,000 hours of light out of the LED bulbs.
Medium fires all three bulbs at a slightly higher intensity and it just gets brighter from there until you cycle back down to Low.
The flashing modes are an SOS mode, a fast flashing strobe and a steady flashing beacon output.
A word of warning, looking straight into the torch at higher outputs will dazzle you. I reckon doing something particularly dumb with this torch could seriously damage your eyes.
Output Tests:
Once you fire it up past Low power and point it at a wall, you immediately learn something rather critical about this torch: it isn't a spotlight.
The beam consists of a rather tight and bright central spot with a very loose, and still considerably bright, penumbra.
To measure the spread, I set my TK-45 up on my camera tripod, fired it at a wall from a range of 1m and casually measured the results with a tapemeasure. FYI: the vertical boards of my wall are 100mm wide.
At Low power, the central spot is approximately 14cm across while the whole spread is around 40cm.
At Medium-High-Ridiculous power settings, the central spot is approximately 25cm across and the penumbral spread is around 130cm.
A quick bit of hazy high school trigonometry tells me that the centre spot has a spread angle of approximately 14 degrees while the total spread is approximately 74 degrees.
Now, a 14 degree beam is pretty damn tight and the centre spot is certainly very bright, but a 74 degree beam is more of a floodlight than a torch.
Fenix claims the torch will light things up at 200m.
After some unscientific tests involving walking my dog, FizzPop, on a dark night I can report that, yes, it will light up a black and white border collie at somewhere around 150-200m.
Unfortunatly the glare of all the excess light hitting the ground between me and FizzPop dazzled me to the point I couldn't actually see him terribly well at all. I needed to shield my eyes against the glare from the ground in order to make FizzPop out at more than around 100m.
And herein lies the rub with the TK-45.
It's a whole hell of a lot of light output, but it's not terribly well controlled and there is no focusing mechanism.
In many situations, this can be a major plus. For example, the TK-45 would make an excellent camping torch, especially for lighting up a food prep area or providing lots of light when setting up tents at night.
During the regular brownouts we experience here in Longreach, the TK-45 pointed at the roof of my living room at High power bounces enough light back down to comfortably read by. At Medium power, you could easily have a game of cards in the same situation and my ceilings are 15' high.
I've even experimented using the TK-45 as a photographic light fired through a brolly. It works well enough in that regard, but I'd probably prefer to use a flashgun that talks to the camera.
The super-wide spread would really come into it's own if you ever seriously needed to activate one of the beacon modes. I daresay a 74 degree spread in that circumstance would be a lot more useful than a 14 degree beam for attracting attention.
Possible future development:
The triple-barrel LED assembly has plenty of scope for further development. I see no reason why future versions of the TK-45 couldn't have six or more LED barrels in their arrays. Possibly have some of them focused into a very tight beam.
Other possibilities for additional accessories might include a mountable reflector to concentrate the beam.
Such a device would need to be carefully designed and machined in order to work and it would probably need to be optimised for one distance. If a reflector type add-on hit the market, I would snap it up.
Coloured domes to snap on the front of the torch are already available from Fenix along with 'wand' type attachments for those who do some traffic control or similar work. Fenix also offers mounts to turn your torch into a bicycle headlight.
Conclusions:
The TK-45 is an excellent torch, no two ways about it.
While much of what China produces is cheap, lowest-possible-tender garbage, the torch that Ron sent me is an example of what China can produce when their primary aim is a quality product.
Build quality is excellent. Mine has taken a few tumbles, been rained on and dropped in water and has kept kicking along.
The ability to use a very low power output along with carrying a considerable amount of battery energy is, to my mind, a major plus.
In a survival situation, with a set of fully charged batteries and only using Low power for an average of five hours per night, the TK-45 would give you around 45 days of use before you needed to recharge the batteries.
The wide spread of the beam is both good and bad and should be taken into consideration before making any purchasing decision.
I'm very happy with my TK-45. While I can see myself getting another high-powered torch with a much more concentrated beam, I can also see the TK-45 being used for many years to come.
If you need a super-tight beam or the ability to focus your torch, you had best look elsewhere.
If you want truly ludicrous amounts of light on tap at a very competitive price, this could well be the torch for you.
Anyways, that's my $0.02 on the Fenix TK-45. Thank you for reading, constructive criticism welcome.
cheers
sambo.
Links:
Fenix homepage.
now the competition's over, i figured i'd post it here for BladeForums.com members.
any feedback much appreciated.
cheers
sambo.
- - - -
Introduction:
Fenix isn't a company I'd heard much about before I spotted their TK-45 model in Ron's 'In Stock' threads.
The promise of '760 retina melting lumens' caught my fancy and I ordered it just prior to Christmas 2010. Other deciding factors included the use of easy-to-acquire AA batteries and the funky three-bulb design.
A bit of net-fu and reading up on Fenix while waiting for the package to arrive led me on a strange journey through the candlepower forums and a few worthwhile reviews on Fenix and their products. They appeared to be fairly well regarded and, from what I could gather, I had a pretty impressive piece of kit on the way.
Physical Attributes:
It comes packed in a rather solid plastic case that, with some modification, I'm sure a resourceful person could find all sorts of other uses for.
Loading up the eight AA Eneloop batteries I power mine with involves unscrewing the back cap. The lighting head assembly unscrews from the other end, leaving a lightweight, hollow aluminium tube to hold the batteries and connect the two ends.
Resistance from the O-ring seals at either end is considerable. Once you remove the cap and see the ring itself, you'll immediately understand why. This thing looks like it'd be more at home on some kind of super high pressure gas bottle, not merely sealing up a torch.
The term 'chunky' comes to mind when looking at the O-rings. Fenix thoughtfully includes a spare set of rings in the case for you to lose. A lanyard is also included with the torch.
The threads themselves are all square cut. For reasons that probably make wonderful and fantastic sense if you take the time to understand why, folk with monumental post-counts at the candlepower forums can get all doo-lally excited by square edged threads on torches. Now I can independently confirm that the threads are indeed square cut, I'll assume a tick of approval here too.
The battery cage has a big spring at the 'goes into the lighting assembly' end. Cells are loaded in pairs and aren't particularly well held in by the cage. This isn't a problem sitting at the kitchen table loading them up, but changing batteries in the back of a bumpy ute could turn into a rather frustrating exercise. Once inside, a shake of the torch and you can feel the cage moving slightly against the spring. A vigorous shake and you can hear the cage rattle inside the body of the torch.
Loaded up, it's not particularly heavy, but it certainly isn't an ultra-lightweight nor super compact item. Without batteries, the TK-45 weighs in at 324 grams.
The LED lights themselves are Cree XP-G R5, each rated for 50,000 hours of use.
The controls consist of two side-by-side buttons the marketing gurus have decided to call 'sidewinder switches'.
There are seven modes of operation. Four levels of continuous output and three beacon modes.
The right side switch basically turns the torch On and Off, but a double-tap off-on sequence engages the flashing beacon modes.
The left side switch controls the intensity or the flashing mode (SOS, strobe and beacon).
The TK45 will turn back on in the last torch mode you used.
I call the four torch modes Low, Medium, High and Ridiculous.
Claimed runtimes from Fenix, using 2,500mAh Ni-MH battery, are:
Low: 8 Lumens, 232 hours.
Medium: 95 Lumens, 22 hours.
High: 312 Lumens, 6.5 hours.
Ridiculous: 760 Lumens, 2 hours. If you leave the torch running in Ridiculous mode, it will switch back down to High after around 45 minutes. You can bump it back up again if needs be.
When operating at Ridiculous power mode, a fair amount of heat is being generated which can be felt by hand in front of the light.
Low (or Moonlight as Fenix calls it) is one bulb lighting up with a low intensity. In a dark house, this mode provides plenty of light to see short distances of around 5m. Fumbling around in a tent, this is all you would ever need unless you were reading. If you turn off the light and back on in Low, the bulb being used cycles. Theoretically, if you only ever use this mode, you would get some 150,000 hours of light out of the LED bulbs.
Medium fires all three bulbs at a slightly higher intensity and it just gets brighter from there until you cycle back down to Low.
The flashing modes are an SOS mode, a fast flashing strobe and a steady flashing beacon output.
A word of warning, looking straight into the torch at higher outputs will dazzle you. I reckon doing something particularly dumb with this torch could seriously damage your eyes.
Output Tests:
Once you fire it up past Low power and point it at a wall, you immediately learn something rather critical about this torch: it isn't a spotlight.
The beam consists of a rather tight and bright central spot with a very loose, and still considerably bright, penumbra.
To measure the spread, I set my TK-45 up on my camera tripod, fired it at a wall from a range of 1m and casually measured the results with a tapemeasure. FYI: the vertical boards of my wall are 100mm wide.
At Low power, the central spot is approximately 14cm across while the whole spread is around 40cm.
At Medium-High-Ridiculous power settings, the central spot is approximately 25cm across and the penumbral spread is around 130cm.
A quick bit of hazy high school trigonometry tells me that the centre spot has a spread angle of approximately 14 degrees while the total spread is approximately 74 degrees.
Now, a 14 degree beam is pretty damn tight and the centre spot is certainly very bright, but a 74 degree beam is more of a floodlight than a torch.
Fenix claims the torch will light things up at 200m.
After some unscientific tests involving walking my dog, FizzPop, on a dark night I can report that, yes, it will light up a black and white border collie at somewhere around 150-200m.
Unfortunatly the glare of all the excess light hitting the ground between me and FizzPop dazzled me to the point I couldn't actually see him terribly well at all. I needed to shield my eyes against the glare from the ground in order to make FizzPop out at more than around 100m.
And herein lies the rub with the TK-45.
It's a whole hell of a lot of light output, but it's not terribly well controlled and there is no focusing mechanism.
In many situations, this can be a major plus. For example, the TK-45 would make an excellent camping torch, especially for lighting up a food prep area or providing lots of light when setting up tents at night.
During the regular brownouts we experience here in Longreach, the TK-45 pointed at the roof of my living room at High power bounces enough light back down to comfortably read by. At Medium power, you could easily have a game of cards in the same situation and my ceilings are 15' high.
I've even experimented using the TK-45 as a photographic light fired through a brolly. It works well enough in that regard, but I'd probably prefer to use a flashgun that talks to the camera.
The super-wide spread would really come into it's own if you ever seriously needed to activate one of the beacon modes. I daresay a 74 degree spread in that circumstance would be a lot more useful than a 14 degree beam for attracting attention.
Possible future development:
The triple-barrel LED assembly has plenty of scope for further development. I see no reason why future versions of the TK-45 couldn't have six or more LED barrels in their arrays. Possibly have some of them focused into a very tight beam.
Other possibilities for additional accessories might include a mountable reflector to concentrate the beam.
Such a device would need to be carefully designed and machined in order to work and it would probably need to be optimised for one distance. If a reflector type add-on hit the market, I would snap it up.
Coloured domes to snap on the front of the torch are already available from Fenix along with 'wand' type attachments for those who do some traffic control or similar work. Fenix also offers mounts to turn your torch into a bicycle headlight.
Conclusions:
The TK-45 is an excellent torch, no two ways about it.
While much of what China produces is cheap, lowest-possible-tender garbage, the torch that Ron sent me is an example of what China can produce when their primary aim is a quality product.
Build quality is excellent. Mine has taken a few tumbles, been rained on and dropped in water and has kept kicking along.
The ability to use a very low power output along with carrying a considerable amount of battery energy is, to my mind, a major plus.
In a survival situation, with a set of fully charged batteries and only using Low power for an average of five hours per night, the TK-45 would give you around 45 days of use before you needed to recharge the batteries.
The wide spread of the beam is both good and bad and should be taken into consideration before making any purchasing decision.
I'm very happy with my TK-45. While I can see myself getting another high-powered torch with a much more concentrated beam, I can also see the TK-45 being used for many years to come.
If you need a super-tight beam or the ability to focus your torch, you had best look elsewhere.
If you want truly ludicrous amounts of light on tap at a very competitive price, this could well be the torch for you.
Anyways, that's my $0.02 on the Fenix TK-45. Thank you for reading, constructive criticism welcome.
cheers
sambo.
Links:
Fenix homepage.
