Klarus xt11gt—opticsplanet, august 27, 2019, plus accessories - Klarus XT11GT HD Rechargeable Tactical Flashlight - 2000 Lumens

The first problem began with the shirt clip, a necessity for me having shopped this flashlight very hard. I’ve abused it to the point of having the light’s black paint under the fingernail long term. No, do not follow YouTube and scrape this light with your BenchmadeUSA knife! (The right shirt/pocket clip is a little thing and will eventually break in.) Another potential little problem is the weak, flapping rubber cover for the in-flashlight USB charger (which takes an awful long time). It will be the first to break, hence my hesitation to rely on it, but what’s underneath is very solid and apparently water resistant. I immediately bought a Nitecore® digicharger wall unit, which also takes hours and am glad I bought the two extra batteries from BatteryJunction.com, which have just come in and will need to be carefully rotated. I never altered the XT11GT’s default settings as I found them ideal; and I never bothered to read much of the manual, preferring to fool around and learn it intuitively, and I’m old with brain damage. The default switch for the strobe rattles, rattling me a little. But that’s the extent of my concerns. Here’s what I got when I called OpticsPlanet.com, a distributor fully available by old-school telephone with very knowledgeable customer-service representatives supplying a solid, fourth-generation flashlight with turbo power built in China before the trade war. I do not believe the product projects fully 2000 lumens, but it doesn’t matter. The brightest setting is too bright for a close application except maybe a physical, defensive one. But there are three other levels of brightness that last virtually forever and would meet other applications just as effectively, and they’re simple to access and control with the extraneous brightness switch up on the side containing the charge indicator from a green to yellow to red lighted dot when the unit turns on. I’m very grateful the SOS strobe never kicks in. The level of brightness—whatever it is—descends very intelligently from the highest to lowest. The power descends from 2000 lumens to 400 as seamlessly as from 400 to 100 and 100 to 10, all of which confirm their actual brightness plausibly. The charger functions with more precise measurements, two decimal points, 3.6v = 3.73v at the moment. So I have in hand a complete package, a military-grade, highly sophisticated tactical flashlight with an extended strike bezel of bright, sharp steel intensifying the light’s throw into a powerful four-leaf clover that surpasses the Surefires and Streamlights I have grown up with, and far, far away from the old Mag-Lites we used more as bludgeons than lamps. This Klarus flashlight itself is larger and smarter than expected. Anything more powerful would add to its bulk and battery capacity. For $20 extra for double the brightness I didn’t need the headaches of experimental technology. Because there appears to be a theoretical practical limit as to how powerful these lights can shine, as this light seems to exceed the boiling point in about 30 seconds at its top setting. The more powerful lights are even clunkier and probably hotter more quickly. What I like most is that even with the unit’s onboard charge indicator long in dire red, the flashlight itself doesn’t dim slowly like the old LEDs with deadening batteries. The charger system pays for itself in a few weeks. This is one top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art flashlight designed to address a range of needs, if not all of them—everything it can. Let’s see how long it lasts. Five stars because this is the nicest flashlight I have ever seen, handled, owned, and I have shopped in police-supply outlets for decades while working for a lighting designer over an equivalent time. This Klarus thing is something else.