Diving with OrcaTorch D530 UV Dive Light! 😘😘

[OrcaTorch's Amazon Dealer]

Thanks for Robert Renfrow sharing with us a review of OrcaTorch D530 UV Dive light.

Great & Compact Dive Light - ORCATORCH UV light will bring the reef to life! The 395nm LED creates an amazing fluorescent effect. The UV light is almost invisible to the naked eye, so only the fluorescent colors are revealed.

Multifunctional: Easily detect objects unseen by the naked eye. Such as searching for amber and minerals, revealing dried pet urine stains, odor of other small animals on carpets clothes floor, scorpion hunting, detect fluorescence, money, ID cards, passports and so on.

Awesome video~ Check it out~

Click here to see more details on Amazon

 

[TNEngineer]

Here's another review of the D530UV.

We had a older dive light that included UV as a sort of secondary emitter. It illuminated fluorescent objects pretty well but left us wondering about the "OH WOW" comments we'd read from others about UV night dives.

Then we noticed that OrcaTorch was offering a new UV light, the D530UV. We'd had good experiences with other OrcaTorch lights and thought perhaps it could improve our UV night diving, so we bought one via Amazon and it arrived in a few days.

First, the packaging is very good indeed. Amazon ships it in a exterior cardboard box. Inside that is a white OrcaTorch box, and inside THAT is a very nice hardside zipper case for the light and its accessories:

Needless to say, the light is very well protected!

When you unzip the hardside case, you're greeted by the light itself, a 3400mAH battery, a USB charging cable, a wrist lanyard, spare o-rings, and documentation:

The USB charging cable is meant to be used with the USB port on the side of the battery (visible in the photo above). This is a recent trend in rechargeable batteries where charge-management circuitry is built right into the battery itself. The convenience is unquestionable, but personally I prefer to use an AC powered multicell charger that gives me control over charge rate and allows me to monitor things. For minimalist travel, though, the OrcaTorch battery is hard to beat.

The light unscrews mid-body to access the battery compartment. It is sealed by three o-rings which come pre-greased from the factory, with three spares included. The light is rated to 150 meters, well past recreational depths.

The light body also has an orange "grip ring" made of grippy elastomer. At first we thought this was purely decorative, but during use it really did help to keep the otherwise smooth-exteriored light oriented in your hand.

The light has a single user control - a pushbutton, by far our favorite type of light control. Twist ring switches can trick you into accidentally unscrewing and flooding the battery compartment. The D530UV button is pressed once for full brightness, a second time for roughly half brightness, and a third time to turn it off again. While the light is on the button has an LED indicating the charge state of the battery. Anything other than green or orange means you're getting low on charge.

I've always questioned the use of battery status LED's, since they report how much your battery is discharged by discharging it faster! A better approach might be to flash the indicator 1-5 times indicating charge states of 20-100%. The resulting lower duty cycle would consume less power while conveying more detailed information. Thankfully, in this case it's probably not a big deal since the primary LED is consuming probably two orders of magnitude more current than the button LED.

One more technical detail before we get to the underwater photos. The D530UV's wavelength is specified as 395nm, which is theoretically on the edge of human vision. However, LED's are not perfectly monochromatic and the human eye doesn't have brick-wall wavelength response. The result is that you can indeed see "blue" light when the D530UV is turned on, but the light you're seeing isn't the total intensity of the UV being emitted.

On to what matters: Underwater UV performance! Our next night dives are a couple of months away and we wanted to evaluate the DS530UV ahead of that trip in case it didn't perform as expected. Lacking any naturally fluorescing flora and fauna in our dive tank, we found four children's toys at a local big box store in fluorescent colors (we insured they were truly fluorescent using the DS530UV in the store!). We glued those to a piece of wood, laid it on the bottom of the tank, and held it in place with dive weights. Then we killed the tank lights to create our own private night dive.

Photos were taken with an Olympus TG-6 dive camera, which has a smaller objective lens so light gathering (and thus focus) isn't as good as your own eyes.

Here's the scene with all light extinguished. You can just barely make out our four little "targets":

Our older UV light has a constant-density beam. The new D530UV has a flood pattern with a hotspot in the center. This makes it difficult to compare them directly, but we can get close by comparing the old light with the annular ring of the DS530UV's flood pattern.

This is what our old light presented:

(continued below due to five image limit)

 

[TNEngineer]

(continued from above)

Here is what the new D530UV generated - with just its flood edge! And this is on the LOW setting.

The D530UV's high setting was overpowering for reasonable testing in the tank's crystal-clear water. The high setting might be more useful in ocean water with less clarity, or perhaps to illuminate reef walls at double-digit distances, but if you're at all close to the target(s) you can easily switch to low power and double your battery life. All D530UV photos here are with its low power setting. Honest.

Here's the D530UV's hotspot directed at an object that fluoresces in the yellow-green portion of the spectrum:

...and here's an object in the red portion of the spectrum:

In both photos you can see the flood ring illuminating the tank bottom, and the edges of the hotspot around the object in question. There's a lot of UV here.

When discussing lights, especially those with hotspots, collimation is another figure of merit. Collimation refers to the parallelism, or collinearity, of the sides of a light beam. Most beams are cone shaped, meaning they spread with greater distance. Better hotspots have high collimation so they maintain a smaller, tighter spot even at greater distances.

Here is a side shot of the beam from the D530UV, with the hotspot illuminating an object:

That's excellent collimation. That spot will not spread too much with distance, meaning it will continue to be useful for objects farther away - especially if you kick it up to full power.

Finally, here is a nearly straight-on shot against the far wall of the tank so we can analyze the overall light pattern:

The color variation between the hotspot and the flood pattern does not appear this way to your eye. I suspect the camera's sensor was being tricked by the combination of UV and fluorescence, with the much higher intensity of the hotspot affecting the area immediately surrounding it. To the eye there isn't an annular "ring" aroundthe hotspot like the camera suggests. It's a hotspot surrounded by a constant brightness flood pattern.

Everything has room for improvement, so if we could suggest one update it would be to include a white emitter in the same dive light. First button press could be full power white, second could be half power white, third could be full power UV, fourth could be half power UV, and fifth (or hold for a couple of seconds) could be off. This would be a single light that could serve as a primary dive light day or night. Toss a small backup light in a pocket for night dives and you'd be set for anything.

In summary, the D530UV is our new favorite UV tool. It's a single-purpose dive light; it does not have any white emitters so it cannot be your only light. But for specialized UV diving purposes it's the best we've seen so far. It's packaged well, very rugged, includes the necessary accessories, all at an excellent price. We highly recommend OrcaTorch and their new D530UV!