Customer Reviews

Excalibur Electronic Forever Flashlight

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an extremely low-powered and inefficient shake flashlight. It takes half a minute of shaking to get half a minute of dull light, so this flashlight has about a 1-to-1 ratio of light time to shake time. At full brightness it's about half as bright as a small maglite or other mini flashlight.

Compared to other shake/crank flashlights, this one is terrible. Other shakers/crankers have upwards of a 20-to-1 ratio of light time to shake/crank time (in other words, with other (better) products you shake/crank it for 1 second and you get 20 seconds of light, rather than the 1 second that this product gives). This flashlight's light quality is poor. It's a greyish-blue colour (rather than white or light yellow, like a flashlight should be), and the edges of the light is rainbow-coloured. And, the light output power isn't constant, so at first the light is comparatively bright, but then it slowly dims. Other higher quality shake/crank flashlights have built-in circuitry that ensures that the light level is constant for as long as the light is on.

This flashlight's build quality is quite good, but it's way too heavy for a shake flashlight. It weights about 1.5lbs, but shake flashlights shouldn't be any heavier than about 1lb because any more than that and it gets very tiring to shake the flashlight (which is definitely true with this flashlight). On the plus side, this flashlight's heavy weight does help it to be very rugged.

I highly recommend not buying this flashlight. There are much better alternatives out there, many of which are cheaper and have much better features. Overall I recommend avoiding shake flashlights. Although there are much better shakers available than this one, even the best ones don't compare to the best dynamo crank flashlights in terms of brightness and usage time. Plus, it's easier to turn a crank than to shake a flashlight.

The idea of this flashlight was great, in case of emergency you can get a light without worrying about out of battery, but you will need to shake until your hands off in order to get it charge. Imagine if you are in a car and stuck in snow, and you want to use the flashlight to get some notice for help, you can just forget about it, I mean, if you save up the energy you use to get it charged, maybe you can live even longer to wait for help.

I own a more expensive shake-to-charge flashlight and was intrigued by the Excalibur's low price. I bought a dozen to give to my friends here in west Africa. Alas, the light emitted, while detectable, was so weak that none found it useful for them. And these are people who have no electricity in their homes!

This was definitely a case of too-good-to-believe.

Sure takes a lot of shaking to get it to work and then it is not as bright as I had hoped.

Fabulous invention for emergency use. Easy to use and store. No worry about batteries.