Thrunite TN 36-UT Review

Hello there, welcome back. In this video, the sun is just setting over there, very very low in the sky, within an hour or so, pretty much dark, and what better time to tell you about something that'll turn night into day. Having my hand here, the new TN36-UT flashlight from ThruNite. Now I actually bought the previous model to this, 18 months ago maybe? And it was just called TN-36. It was... I think it was 6,000... 6,100 lumens or something like that. Which is ridiculously bright. It's, uh... I mean, it literally does just turn night into day. This new model is even brighter, believe it or not. You're probably thinking to yourself, before you even check out the price, from the link in the video description, why in the hell has he bought the new version if that other one was so powerful and so good? Well, on the previous version, the... Boost function ceased to work after about a year. When I clicked on there, it would go on extremely bright for about a second, and then it would cut out, and that was actually a fault with the flashlight. So I contacted ThruNite, sent it back. It actually went back to Germany from the UK, and with very good German efficiency, they sent me a new one out, and it was a new model that they sent out, so I haven't actually bought this one. It's been sent to me in place of the previous one, which I did buy. It's pretty much exactly the same. So, I'm not going to do like a super in-depth review of this. Now, on paper, this one is about 15 to 20% brighter. I think it's 7,300 lumens or something like that. To be honest, lumens and all that, it means nothing to me. I wish you would put it in candle power. I understand candle power because I used to have a lamp that was a million candle power. When you put it on, you knew that that light coming out of it was equivalent to a million candles. Lumens is, it's a different way of working things out and I just don't understand it. It's damn bright though, and that comes at a price, which you'll see once you've watched this video, if you check out the link, but I don't really think ThruNite have got any equal when it comes to flashlight manufacture. So, you know, something's only worth what people are willing to spend on it, and if you've got a good name, matched with good quality and excellent customer service, you can command a high price. So, overpriced, debatable, good quality and reliable, yes. Before I do the obligatory turning it on and shining it into the camera, I'll just give you a brief rundown of what comes in the box. Now I hate those pointless unboxing videos that seem to be blighting YouTube as much as anybody, but I still think it's important to show you exactly what comes in the box. So this is what comes with this particular kit. We've got a four battery charger. That one has got a UK plug. When it was sent it actually had a European plug but luckily I had this particular UK plug from one of my previous ThruNite chargers so that works fine. Four high capacity batteries which go in this flashlight. These are 3400 milliamp hours and they are 18650 batteries which basically, I said it before, it's basically just like an AA on steroids. We've got the flashlight itself, which is an aluminium body. Cradle for the four batteries goes inside there and then we've got the main head and this is the intelligent part. It's got our switch on where you can switch between the various modes and it's got three LEDs, really high quality, high output LEDs. In addition to that we've got some spare seals for the main body and also a spare seal for the button that fits underneath here. And we've also got a belt mounted carrying case as well. Very well made, it's also got a loop on there so you can attach that to your backpacks. And it's a pretty comprehensive kit. So there you go. So there you go, that's what comes in the box. Certainly a very comprehensive kit, and it's certainly everything that you're going to need. Okay, here's a quick look at the charger in action. It's charging all four batteries at once, and it's shown the remaining charge in the way of volts, and also some sort of visual representation. So if you've only got one of the little three flashing icons there, that means that it's very low on charge, and the voltage might be down to about 3.6 volts, but as you charge it, the stored voltage goes up, and also, obviously, the amount of charge that's in the battery goes up as well, until it reaches 4.2 volts, and all three of those little indicators are full. It charges a wide range of battery sizes, so instead of me running through them, I'll just show you what they are. See the information there and from being pretty flat to being more or less full it takes only about two, two and a half hours or so with these particular batteries which are the 18650 batteries. Actually when I was showing you what comes in the box I forgot to say that everything's kind of individually wrapped and you've got your batteries under there, got spare ones in there. I like to keep everything all in one place and it's also got the necessary instructions and guarantees and so on. This works in pretty much the same way as all the ThruNites that I've got. I've got, I think, three basic power settings. Got low, medium, high. Double press for boost, and then double press again for a strobe effect. So I'll just cycle through those. See what you think. Is that on? I can hardly tell. The sun's reflecting off it. That's basically Firefly mode, which is used for navigating at night. It uses very, very little power and will run for days, so... That's a good one when it's really pitch black and you don't need to light anything up beyond about 5 or 6 yards in front of you. Good one for navigation. It's a little bit brighter. You can hopefully see that one. And brighter again. Double click. I can hardly see the viewfinder there because it's blanked it all out. But hopefully you can see that that is very, very bright. And double click again for the strobe. Turn that off before anybody has an epileptic fit. They're the basic features of it. Now this is rated to be fully waterproof. Not just shower proof. Immersed fully in water and still work. So we'll give that a test. Here we go, 100% waterproof. I'm actually going to leave this in here for a few hours as well, just to make double sure. And hopefully when I come back, it'll still work. There we go, two hours later. Hey, still works. No problems there. And now the bit that really matters, which is getting into an area that we can really throw some light on and hopefully pick up the effect on this camera. It's very difficult to get a good impression of what the eye actually sees when you're using a camcorder. Quite often when I'm looking at flashlight reviews and people are going out and thinking, that doesn't throw much light at all. And that's the camcorder. It's not the flashlight itself. The human eye, compared to a camcorder's eye, can see much lower light levels. So you're just going to have to take my word for it, if the footage doesn't come out very well, that I'm about to show you, that this is really just like a portable floodlight. It's like a searchlight. You know, you expect to be finding the German Luftwaffe flying overhead with it at 10,000 feet. It's that bright. It really does light up a massive area, which makes it not very good for lamping, i.e. shooting rabbits on a night, because you want a more focused beam, and there's no way to focus this. But for search and rescue, it's perfect. I mean, it's very, very small. It comes with that belt holster. Whip this out, and you're going to be lighting up a whole mountainside. Excellent for search and rescue. Okay, this is just a comparative test. I did the review on the original TN-36 looking over my pond. So I'm going to be shooting this from exactly the same place. This one is more powerful and it definitely lights up more area. Here we go, full power. Boom. Everything is lit up. It's an absolute floodlight. And those trees over there are approximately... 35 yards away, roughly 35 meters, which is over 100 feet. As you know, camcorders don't pick up light very well in the dark, so often when people are demonstrating flashlights, it doesn't look very impressive. But to me, that looks impressive. It's approximately 35 yards away over there, and that has lit the whole area up really, really bright. Overall, it's an excellent flashlight, but I actually bought something extra, which wasn't available from ThruNite, to go on here. I like filters for flashlights, and this I had to actually buy from one of their competitors. I'll put the link to it in the video description. That fits over the end, and I actually got this in error. I ordered one for my smaller flashlight that's mounted to one of my rifles, and they sent this instead. And I was going to send it back, and then I found out that it actually fit. The TN36, exactly, it's a perfect fit, and that's a red filter. So for navigating through woodland, it's absolutely excellent because you don't get all that reflected light back. So I was really pleased that the supplier made a mistake there. Obviously I still paid for it, but I would never have found that otherwise because it was wrongly labelled on Amazon. So I'll put the link to this. If you want a filter for one of these fellas, you can get it. And that leads me to one thing that I'm disappointed about with regard to the ThruNite flashlights. As far as I can see, ThruNite don't actually make filters of various colours for their own flashlights. So anybody that wants one has got to buy one from one of their competitors. And I find that really strange. Now maybe that's because they're not really into the hunting market. This is not a hunting lamp or a hunting flashlight. This provides a massive illuminated area, so it's not suitable for lamping where you really need quite a tight beam in the middle with a less bright halo around it. This basically lights up just a massive area. It's more for search and rescue, for medium to long range navigation as well. Now that's the TN-36 with the red filter on, and that's the second highest output. I'm not quite sure how many lumens that one is. I think it's maybe 3,000, 4,000 lumens. And that's only about 15-20 yards away, so it's not very far away, but you can see how it lights up that huge area. The high power, and we're in full red mode there. It's very good for navigating your way through trees and so on. You don't get the reflected light that you do when you're just using the ordinary beam. Now as far as navigation through woodland goes, I do have a light on the front of the camcorder, as you can see. It's shining on the back of my hand, and that's actually enough to navigate by. Obviously, you wouldn't normally be carrying a camcorder around. So that is the Firefly setting. On this ThruNite TN36UT. Very very dull setting, excellent for navigating on a night and if you're actually using a red filter you can navigate perfectly without people seeing you from a distance. You haven't got all the reflected light you would have if you were using an ordinary white light. The contrast, there it is with just the white light, that's the lowest power setting. That is really just for navigation and you can see there's a hell of a lot of reflected light You're going to be spotted. With the red filter on, you're a lot less likely to be spotted. See how much light's reflecting back off that tree as well. Put the red filter on, and that tree is now not reflecting. Obviously, we can't see quite as far into the distance, but you're not getting all that reflected light, so your night vision is being retained. And that is very, very important, because if you've suddenly got to switch this off, bloop, you're going to be relying on your night vision. Now, if while you've been watching this, you've sneakily checked out the link to see the price, you'll probably be seeing, I'm not paying that much for a flashlight. Well, there is another option. There's another link in there for the TN30, which is 3,600 lumens, which is still plenty bright enough. And that one is very affordable. That one would be the one to go for if you want masses of light on a budget and you want it quality. Putting the words through night and quality in the same sentence is very, very easy to do. I've got quite a few through night flashlights now. And I've bought them for different reasons. This one is literally just for searching whole bank sides. If ever anybody goes missing, I'm going to be the one to find them when I've got this fella. I've got smaller ones, which are like EDC flashlights. I've got ones that you wear on your head. TN, no, TH10, that one. Still haven't done a review on that, and that one's been superseded by the TH20. So I'm well behind. Everyone I've had, I've been very, very happy with them. And I'm not the sort of person that will buy something purely on price. I want quality, after-sales service, and reliability. Not necessarily in that order, but certainly all three are very, very important. The last thing you want is to be in any sort of situation when you're relying on gear, and it fails you. And I've got every faith in ThruNite. They're a very, very good manufacturer. So check out the links if you haven't already checked them out. Hope you've enjoyed this video and I shall see you next time. Thanks for watching.