I finally dived with the Sartek tonight at Breakwater at night. My buddy had a Salvo 21 watt LED, so that's what I'll be comparing to. My instructor has a Salvo 9 watt LED, but as we were crashing this dive, I didn't get a chance to compare it with that. Please keep in mind that this is my first can light and the only other lights I've used are the UK eC4 & UK Mini eQ40
First, the light itself feels pretty solid. Body is made of aluminum, seems just like a MagLite body--simple cylinder with a spring at one end and an opening at the other. Mine came with an lanyard attached at the end. The LED head is made of delrin and seems pretty rugged and has a decent weight to it. I'm assuming this to be because of the powering off of the LED's when the voltage gets low with the batteries. The supplied canister cable is long--I want to say something like 4'. Even with the can in my right thigh pocket and the head on my left hand, arm stretched, I have a lot of slack. I'll have to figure out a way to manage the excess. Good news to all of you giant folk--you won't complain about the cord being too short. The LED head screws into the body & the can adapter with ease, the can adapter for the body, you have to make sure things are level before screwing. The can adapter for the body has a great rubber end, really great when you have thick rubber gloves that are wet. The delrin head is not so friendly. I'll probably wrap it with a inner tube to fix that.
I ordered the goodman mount with the light and I have to say, that it's a nice and solid. Fully adjustable (width & height). It definitely does the job. Bad news is that if for some reason you wanted to use the goodman while it's a non-cam light, you're out of luck--the goodman only fits around the can converter that attaches to the LED head. I'm sure you can DIY one that wraps around the LED head using an inner tube, plastic ties, aluminum/plastic plate & some webbing. In Sartek's brochure, the goodman mount is supposed to come with both hard & soft handles. For some reason, I'm missing the soft handle, but they did give me another mount with (I'm thinking brass) clip so I'm not complaining.
Onto the actual performance of the light. The specs say that it has a 8 degree spread, my buddy's Salvo is supposed to have a 6 degree spread. Shinning my light off into the distance, it does do a good job of illuminating things like a flood light. I shinned my light at some students as they were doing some drills ~10' away and the hotspot lit the up fine. A bit utside the hotspot, and I could still see them fine. Compared to my buddy's Salvo, the Sartek light is noticably warmer. And it definitely doesn't shine as far (my light is ~1/2 the price though). Our dive only lasted ~40 minutes and it was definitely going strong (burn time at full power is supposed to be ~2-3 hours). Sartek's spec sheet says that this is a 660 lumen light from 3 220 lumen LEDs. I don't know if you can stack LEDs together like that for lumen ratings. My instructor's 9 watt Salvo has a single cluster of 6 LEDs, for comparison.
In summary, I really like the idea that I can convert the light into a can light or normal light with ease. It takes normal c cells instead of a proprietary battery which is something I definitely like. Whereas with the 9 & 21 watt Salvos, I've seen they use a proprietary battery. Nice thing there is that they have wet connectors I believe.
This is just my opinion and I have no preference/allegiance/affiliations towards any of the companies. PLUG: When I was looking for the best price on the 660, I found that diverightinscuba was selling it for ~$515 or so with free s&h. I sent a barrage of emails asking all sorts of things and Mike was always friendly and responsive. He didn't have any in stock and had it shipped straight from the company. I also am not affiliated with diverightinscuba, but am a happy customer.
If there's anything I missed, or you would like to know, PM me and I'll try to respond.
luckily I had a backup. I'm not in search of a new primary and would like some recommendations. I don't do that much night diving at the moment. I would like to stay <$400, but if I can get a decent canister LED for a bit more, I could convince myself to fork out some more.
