Streamlight Survivor LED

The Survivor LED is a sadly flawed product. The two major problems are:

1. The alkaline battery carrier does not properly hold the cells, letting the light be turned off by a light upward shake.
2. The low mode is not nearly low enough. It looks only a little bit dimmer than the high mode.

If these two issues were fixed, this would be a fine light, even with a two-piece battery pack (which I'm also not fond of).

As of now, only the first problem has been fixed. If you get an early model with a faulty battery solution, it's covered under Streamlight's warranty and you can just send it in. They'll either implement the fix and send it back, or send you a new light. I haven't sent mine it yet, so I don't know which one it'll be.

The second problem bothers me because it makes the light more complicated (albeit only slightly) while not really adding anything. Techincally, the brightness and current draw are actually halved, doubling runtime, but brightness must clearly be decreased by much more than half. If I look carefully, I can tell that the output has decreased in low mode, but if I turn the light off and then back on again, into high mode, as quickly as I can, I can't see any increase in brightness. The low mode needs to be drastically lower, in order to provide a super-runtime "keylight" mode, which allows for navigation or finding screws that have rolled under the firetruck. Since the light is electronically controlled anyway, this should be incredibly easy for Streamlight to do.

This light has a flasher, by the way. It's about 2Hz.

Now, on to the good parts!

This light has a great form factor. It's compact, but powerful and throwy, with a decent runtime off alks or optional NiCad battery packs. It has a clip on the back for attachment to clothing (such as a firefighter's outfit), with a hole in the clip for hanging. The light can also stand up and direct its light forward or be laid on its back, to let it ceiling bounce. All this is pretty much copied from the original incan Survivor.

You can see the alk battery pack below, along with the charging contacts in the battery door for easy charging in a cradle.

Below is the alkaline battery pack with the four included AAs.

This reflector is really huge, letting the Survivor LED throw extremely well, even better than the ProPolys.

This light draws 0.34A on low and 0.67A on high at 5.4V, consuming 1.836W and 3.618W of power, respectively.

I wouldn't recommend this light in its present form, but if Streamlight made a real low mode and eliminated the fidgety battery carrier, they'd have a real winner on their hands.