Energizer Hard Case 2 Cell AA Swivelhead Torch PROSW2A

Since the advent of white LED technology several years ago, I have waited for torch manufacturers to come to grips with the advantages of LEDs in high efficiency and long life, among others. Eveready-Energizer have held out for a long time with their existing bulb based products and it is a pleasant surprise to see that at long last they have grasped the LED nettle and started to engineer products which use the LED to its fullest advantage. Although LED technology is becoming very widespread in torches of many different types, most of them are using LEDs of fairly average brightness or without any reflectors. Regardless of the light intensity of the emitter, the beam drops off fairly rapidly without a properly engineered reflector. As battery life is always a consideration for torches, it stands to reason that making the maximum use of the beam by fitting a proper reflector is an advantage worth having.

Energizer have developed a line of high quality high durability torches called “Hard Case” which start at 2 AA and range up to 2 D size. Practically all of the smaller models now use LEDs, but a bulb is still used in the largest model. While I am still waiting for Energizer to give us a super bright LED 2 D torch with very long battery life, I’m happy to buy the 2 AA swivelhead which is the subject of this review. With a claimed light output of 75 lumens and 5.5 hour run life (presumably on Energizer alkalines), this product fits the bill for a strong bright light in a package that will survive the rigours of working conditions and will fit in a pocket. At around $60 though, it’s not cheap.

The Hard Case’s head normally rests at right angles to the body but can be rotated up or down through an arc just over 90 degrees. The rotating mount is made out of 5 mm thick metal and like everything else about this torch it has a solid rugged feel to it. The torch is claimed to withstand a 6 metre drop, the lens is claimed to be shatterproof and the torch has gaskets fitted at joins to keep water out. However, no claims are made about submersibility. As the torch is obviously designed to resist water I would expect it to survive being dropped into a bucket or some other container filled with liquid but Energizer has not given any guidelines about this. One of the advantages of LEDs is that the emitter can be permanently sealed into the lamp as with a life of 100,000 hours and immunity to burnout or vibration shock, it never needs changing.

Now that I’ve mentioned the emitter, this torch has not one, but in fact four of them, controlled by a pair of  membrane sealed push button switches. The upper switch alternates between two red (“night vision”) or one green (“pipeline inspection”) LEDs of high, but by modern standards, relatively ho-hum brightness level. The lower switch is the one you want to be more careful of. One push illuminates the main emitter’s fantastically bright 75 lumen beam, while a second push switches it to a lower power level. I would guess the emitter is probably about a 3 watt unit, and as everyone hopefully knows, on no account should you ever look into the light as it has the capacity to permanently damage your eyesight. With the advantage of a properly designed reflector in its favour, the swivelhead’s full power output easily outperforms a cheaper 2 D Energizer with four “ordinary” LEDs and no reflector. The emitter is bright, but the reflector is what makes the beam blinding and thus it outperforms by a wide margin anything else in its class. Simply put as a torch it packs the best performance I have ever seen in 2 AAs and I am now waiting for that 2 D high power LED Hard Case, or perhaps an LED Dolphin would be nice (maybe I can get one of those drop in LED bulbs for my customised Dolphin, which has been upgraded with a gel cell).

FOOTNOTE: Since I made my original posting, a friend noted that the colours output by this torch are the same ones used in hand signals for trains – red, green and white. I have thought about this a little, and in theory you could use this torch for this purpose, but in practice it could be too slow and awkward to be able to change the colours in situations where a rapid change is needed as, for example, changing quickly from a Go to Stop signal (red to green). When I was involved some years ago in a heritage railway, it was always a point of interest that LED technology was developing to the point where all three colours could be displayed in the same device, which would probably have to be custom assembled built due to the very specific requirements for the three colours used, as we well know that there is virtually nothing out there that is readily available and cheap – I expect that there are commercial devices produced for this purpose, probably at a cost of hundreds of dollars. This particular model of torch may be able to be used in situations like these and is a well made rugged device for outdoor use in all conditions especially where it may be dropped.

FOOTNOTE 2: Energizer do have a 2 D LED model available, PRO2D1, though I have yet to see it in NZ. It has a Cree 3 watt emitter, although the output is actually lower than the PRO2SWA at 65 lumens (about the same as a standard Dolphin torch), the beam has double the useful distance, probably due to a larger reflector, and its runtime on alkalines is a very useful 15 hours. In general this model has similar performance overall to the standard Dolphin but is much more solidly made, and on 2 D cells it is cheaper to run than the 4 Ds or 6V lantern battery of the Dolphin. Also of interest is the TUFRC1, which is a bigger unit in a handheld spotlight form factor though it uses a 3 watt LED, has about the same range and output as the PRO2D1, and is rechargeable. I think that this model is available in NZ but is getting fairly pricey. Top of the range is the specially engineered high power Dolphin, the 108MK6R, with a special halogen bulb, which can run for about 1 hour on a charge and pumps out a massive 210 lumens, but it would be very expensive if available, and the short run time puts it in the same league of impracticality as numerous handheld halogen spotlights already in the marketplace. As is typical with such lights, the 6 V 10W halogen bulbs are hard to come by – in fact, from experience, 6V halogen bulbs for handheld spots are almost impossible to buy in NZ. So the TUFRC1 looks like the best option for replacing any of my large and bulky cordless spots even if the beam won’t go as far. One day I hope a cordless spot engineered with LEDs will become an affordable and practical proposition in a similar power output as the 55/100W 12V models commonly available.

Vegas Movie Studio shines where Premiere Elements fails (Update)

Well, DVD Architect did a superb job of the DVD, incredibly simple to send the completed project from VMS to it in order to put the DVD together, especially simple with the automation of creating a menu from the markers I had previously put into the project in Vegas. It came together very quickly and just needed a little tweaking to get things exactly as I wanted them. And, still no crashes at all. What didn’t work out so well was my idea that I could burn three things at once. I am now going to set up a couple of old desktops with a burner each to enable three simultaneous burns, it is still cheaper than upgrading to the full version of Nero that supposedly can do simultaneous burning. It seems from the testing I have done that ATAPI cannot handle more than one burner process running at a time, it just seems to cause too many hiccups. Lightscribe now has competition from Labelflash, which at this time is not yet mainstream enough in NZ despite support from some bigname vendors. For example, Sony has models that do it, yet even the Sony Shop does not sell them.

UPDATE: Still no crashes in Vegas/DVD Architect yet :) And I learned how to trim a clip and how to fade it out at the end. Mainly I wrote this because another solution has come up for the multi Lightscribe burn debacle. Although Nero doesn’t have a multi Lightscribe option, another vendor, Acoustica, does. Their product is called CD/DVD Label Maker and I plan on testing it out very soon. So I will have my main computer with three Lightscribe drives installed to burn all three at once, and some old desktop heap with just an ordinary burner in it to burn the video part of the DVD. I had already heard of Acoustica when we had a look at their Mixcraft audio mixing software for possible school use. Although we haven’t yet determined a requirement for that level of mixing, I was very impressed with Mixcraft’s capabilities, and like most of Acoustica’s product range, the price is very cheap for such a good software package.

Vegas Movie Studio shines where Premiere Elements fails

Last month I wrote about my experiences with Premiere Elements 4 and how useless a piece of software it has turned out to be. At the time I was struggling to be able to find another piece of software that had similar functionality and so forth, until I discovered there is a cut down version of Sony Vegas, Vegas Movie Studio currently in v9. The initial testing with a demo version seemed straightforward enough but serious editing has had to wait until I could purchase a license. Our local Sonystyle shop was very helpful in getting a copy sent down from Auckland overnight so I will forgive them for having relocated to the odious Westfield Riccarton mall. Having managed to get out of there still sane, I installed Vegas Movie Studio along with DVD Architect onto my optimised Vista box – which is basically the Vista side of this dual boot PC, with a minimal installation of applications, on the hardware side it does have 2 GB of RAM, an extra HDD just for video, two Lightscribe DVD writers and a third writer. I’m looking forward to testing it out to see if it can burn a DVD and two LS labels all at the same time.

Now the contrast with Premiere Elements could not have been more extreme, from the fact that Vegas installed very smoothly, to getting a project started, getting its steps done and outputting it all in a couple of hours. Although I have yet to master the DVD which requires the separate Architect package that I haven’t yet used, and although Vegas does have its own quirks and learning curve, it is a huge improvement, even if just one thing, the fact it can read the MPEG files from the camera almost natively, is recognised. But VMS turns out to be a whole lot more, as in a whole lot more stable, a whole lot more reliable, a whole lot quicker and so on and so on. One tip is that you really need to update to release 9.0b because the version on the install DVD which is 9.0a will not be able to open an AC3 audio stream on MPEG files that use this audio format and so your production will have no soundtrack. Once I got the upgrade installed, the audio was recognised without any hiccups and everything went very smoothly. With cameras that use their own “special” MPEG format (like JVC Everios with the MOD files) you may find it useful to download a utility from the Internet that changes the file format slightly from MOD to a proper MPEG. I did make use of this tool (SDCopy) in the process of trying to work out why there was no sound in the clips but it turned out to be the Vegas version being the issue with the fix in v9.0b for MPEG AC3 sound. So all in all it looks very much like Vegas is massively better value for money than Premiere Elements.

And so to DVD Architect – a simple matter of pressing a button at the end of the VMS render, with all the scene markers already created and saved – then it turned out to be a very simple process to set up menus – and unlike Premiere Elements, still not one single crash. I am just getting ready to burn a sample DVD to take home with me for testing out, then there’s just a little bit of work tomorrow to get the Lightscribe label set up and burn a master for the school to sell to people who want it.