Manker E14 Flashlight Review

The Manker E14 flashlight features a copper middle section for great heat management. The four Nichia 219b have good color rendering, too. Read on!

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Official Specs

Here’s a link to the Manker E14 Flashlight product page.

Manker	E14
Emitter Type	4xCREE XP-G2 / 4xNichia 219B
Circuit Driver	A17DD-L FET+1 Driver (BLF A6)
Light Tint	XPG2 (6500K) / 219B (5000K),
Material	Aero-grade aluminum alloy & copper
Battery Configurations	1 x 18350/16340 battery/1CR123A/1RCR123
Impact Resistant	1 meter
Max Output	XP-G2 1600lumens / Nichia 219B 1400lumens
Working Voltage	2.8-4.35v
Lens	TIR
Waterproof	IPX-8 waterproof 2 meters
Weight	90g without battery
Size	80mm x 24mm(length x body diameter)

Emitter Choices	Color Temperature
Cree XPG2	6500K
Nichia 219B	5000K

The above section contains the manufacturer’s descriptions and claims, not my impressions or results.

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Short Review

Well built, solid light that does what it is purported to do. The user interface is fantastic. It has a small cell and likes to use it fast, but I love it.

Long Review

Key Features

• Quad emitters!
• TIR Optic!
• Copper heatsink!
• That luxurious 219b tint.
• Nice battery options

What’s Included

• Manker E14 Flashlight
• Spare rubber boot
• Lanyard
• Pocket Clip
• Spare o-ring
• Manual/warranty sheet
• Nice box
• Unbridled Joy

 

Quality, Build, and Disassembly

The Manker E14 is a very solid little light. The copper heatsink gives the light quite a bit of heft – after all, copper is around 4x more dense than aluminum; the weight difference is probably the first thing you notice with the light in hand. The head, tail, and battery tube all screw together well, and the threads are nicely lubed. Both ends of the tube are unanodized, but the threads are, allowing mechanical lockout. The threads do not appear to be square-cut – having used this light for a little while, I can say I do wish they were. It’s not that they feel sloppy, it’s that I always feel like I’m going to cross-thread non-square threads.

I had no trouble disassembling the tailcap. Note that the spring is a double spring! The head proved more difficult, and I did not have the tools necessary to disassemble it. I do not think it’s secured with Loctite, as others have reported disassembling it. I have the hand strength of a 5-year-old girl.

I did not keep it under for hours and hours, but it did hold up just fine underwater. The rubber boot has a nice seal and a Teflon(?) liner that keeps things dry inside.

Here is the E14 and S41 tailcap, side by side. And the head. Same BLF driver.

Package and Manual

The manual is simply a small piece of paper. One side is a diagram of the User Interface (a picture of /u/ToyKeeper‘s A6 firmware flowchart), and on the other is general flashlight specification info. The user interface manual can be found all over the internet easily, including right here.

All this comes in a nice compact little box, on which GearBest puts a sticker with a date. Just like with the Nitecore F1 review, I like this because if there’s ever a firmware update, it’ll be easier for me to know which one I have. The other end has the Light info, including emitter choice.

All packaged up very snugly.

Power

The light works with a single cell: 18350 / 16340 / CR123A / RCR123. There’s also an extension tube available, allowing the use of a single 18650. Take note, however, that though they might fit, the driver can’t handle the voltage from two of the smaller cells. So, one cell, even if you have the extension tube.

I only use 16340 cells, currently a Keeppower 700mAh ICR16340 from Illumn. The cell fits just fine with no wobble in any direction – though there is quite a bit of room around the cylinder. It does not rattle at all – probably because of the springs on both ends of the light. So no size adapter is needed.

The extension tube also will not fit any of my protected cells (EVVA 3400 mAh, I believe). Unprotected laptop pulls had no problem at all fitting (and working quite well). The girth is the issue, not the length. So I expect some protected cells will work, just not the ones I have. Still, the light is designed for a 16340. There’s enough mass to handle the heat produced when using the 16340. The 16340 will expire quickly, and fortunately, the head won’t be able to handle much more heat. But with the 18650, the battery will not expire and the light will not be able to continually handle the heat from turbo.² IE there is no thermal management. (Though some have disputed this.)³

User Interface and Operation

The user interface is custom-made by [our very own? – can we claim you?] /u/Toykeeper. It’s absolutely fantastic. It has the unusual ability to go forward and backward in mode selection. I love this because it keeps me from having to cycle through the modes to get to the one I really-meant-to-leave-the-light-on-but-went-too-far-and-now-I-have-to-go-all-the-way-back-through…. I cycle and hit an amount of light that is more than I need, and roll it back to the lower mode. Ultimately, I’m sure it saves battery, though who can say how much? It’s also feature-packed: Battery check, strobe, turbo, bike flasher (which is so cool), and can be set to have memory or no memory. (I never roll with memory because I always want to trust my light to start on low – except in big lights like the Convoy L6). It can even have 4 or 7 modes, all of which are very pleasantly spaced. (Described as “visually-linear output modes” – which I have no way to test, but 4 or 7 modes, both have a useful distance between each mode.)

Here is some detail on the special modes, copied straight from ToyKeeper’s firmware

  - Turbo (just like the regular turbo)

  - Tactical strobe (10 Hz)

  - Battery check / beacon mode
    (each blink represents about 25% of a full charge)
    0 blinks: < 1% full        (< 3.0V)
    1 blink : 1% to 25% full   (3.0V to 3.5V)
    2 blinks: 25% to 50% full  (3.5V to 3.8V)
    3 blinks: 50% to 75% full  (3.8V to 4.0V)
    4 blinks: 75% to 100% full (4.0V to 4.2V)
    5 blinks: > 100% full      (> 4.2V)

  - Biking flasher (2-level stutter beacon, 1 Hz)

The mechanical switch is reverse clicky. I like that fine, but I slightly prefer forward clicky because I like momentary. And I think momentary would be great for the E14, too. I do wish this light had a forward clicky, but not at the expense of the BLF A6 firmware.

I won’t go through the specifics of the modes – the flow chart does that quite well. It looks a little intimidating but works as described. Just remember that the solid lines are short presses, and the dash lines are longer and you should be good to go. I have not had trouble knowing how to get to and from the 7 main modes, but I do often have trouble getting to Turbo from Moon, and also sometimes do that accidentally. I don’t think that’s a fault of the light, I think I just haven’t learned. And I often had trouble hitting the 0.5s-1.5s window to advance through the special modes (Turbo -Tactical strobe – batt check – bike flasher) and that was rather frustrating too. But I believe practice can improve AND it’s intuitive, so you don’t have to sit there practicing with a manual in front of you.

Two get to the “soft config” mode, do 15+ taps, or until the light stops turning on. A “tap” is defined as soft clicking the button, and not fully depressing it (not “clicking” it).

I tried to make a runtime graph but my software messed up and I’m still trying to fiddle with that. I can tell you that the output began dropping immediately, and kept dropping all the way down to the second-highest mode. The light was quite hot at that point and one wouldn’t have been able to comfortably hold it. There’s a timed stepdown from turbo to high, at 45 seconds, but honestly, at that point, the output had sagged to at or below High anyway.

The default turbo step-down is 45 seconds.

Of note per the firmware:

When turbo steps down to high, a short tap will push it back up to turbo or a medium tap will step down further, even if you got to turbo by going backward from moon. The step-down effectively moves it from the “hidden” turbo back to the non-hidden turbo

I’d be surprised if a user would want to use this. The light would be so hot at that point that I couldn’t see things going well. Remember that this firmware was designed for the BLF A6, a single-emitter light. So while it lacks the copper that the E14 has, it also has 1/4 the emitters, so it would likely not have quite as much heat to deal with.

The E14 does have low voltage protection, cutting off at 2.8V. But the driver will continue to sip power^4, so the light does need to be switched off. The firmware wording is actually very specific on this:

Low-voltage protection will progressively step down the output at about 2.8V, and the light will shut itself off when even the lowest level gets below 2.8V.

LED and Beam

These emitters are Nichia 219b in 5000k. The quality of this emitter is well known, and I happen to love it. I have a slew of lights with the 219b, and I love them all. There is a bit of variation among them, as seen in comparison with this Prometheus Beta QR v2 – still, the tint on this E14 is fantastic.

Moonlight is low, but not quite as low as with the Zebralights, or even with the Manker U11.

The beam is a nice punchy spot of light – not “throw” but not all flood either. Great for lighting up a doorway across the room, but it spreads pretty quickly past that. The TIR optic causes this, and I happen to really like it. I like a thrower to a bit of very specific spill, but a TIR light like this – a broad bright spot is great. Beamshots are below:

Beamshots

Manker E14 (5000k) @ [0.3s, f/8, ISO 100]

Retention

One of the new style great clips, which is reversible. And a lanyard. I have carried this light a lot and love the clip. The light is quite short so it sometimes rides a little funny, but it has not come out once or accidentally activated once. The clip is a great length for the light and could be used on the bill of a cap if you wanted, but the weight of the light would make that a silly thing to do. The clip seems to be the same size as the Manker U11 clip – I like that these clips are becoming ubiquitous; this should make them easy to find anywhere and with any light, and also very cheap!

Size

80mm x 24mm(length x body diameter). Of course, the head is a little larger because of the copper heatsink and the quad emitters. For a 16340 light, it’s not particularly small. For a quad emitter light, it’s particularly small. Even in the 18650 configuration, for a quad emitter light, it’s a great size. The copper is great, but I do believe the light could benefit from better cooling (which would require a larger size, which is why I mentioned it here!).

Here are some other lights, so you can compare the size. Nearest in size is the Olight S1, of course, and my old Zebralight H31.

Conundrums

• I wish GearBest sold the 18650 tube, and that the light came with that tube, and that that tube worked with protected cells.
• Momentary would be great, but I’m not sure if that’d play well with the UI.
• Doesn’t Lego with other lights it seems like it would Lego with. (I really mean the Convoy S2+ here, though there’s no good reason to think they should lego, I suppose.)
• Battery cell is reversible, but it doesn’t work both ways.

Compared to…

Astrolux S41: no difference. The clip-on one was black (S41) and gray on the other (E14), but other than that, there’s no difference that I can see.

Olight S1: S1 has just 1 emitter and is much smaller. Overall output is not as high, and the runtimes are similar. The E14 is probably a higher quality built light. I have the brushed titanium version of the S1, so it was more expensive than the E14, and between the tw,o I’d consider the E14 a better value. If size and weight are of utmost concern to you, the S1 might suit you better. But if the price you’re seeing is similar, I’d go with the E14 almost certainly.

Convoy S2+: The S2+ is much cheaper, has a different reflector and just one emitter, but the shape is similar when the E14 is outfitted with the extension tube. In my opinion, the E14 wins with the user interface alone. And if you outfitted the S2+ with the driver from the E14 (which could be done), the prices are similar enough that the E14 wins by having a higher output and better heatsinking. YMMV here, depending on your needs, of course.

BLF-348: Just a beamshot. Both are 219b, so they should be close.

Manker U11: Just a picture.

Summary

I love mine and think it’s a great purchase even if you don’t plan to EDC it. Highly recommended, particularly at the sale prices below.

And I’m just gonna be honest, these are just glamour shots.

Maybe this is my favorite.

Pros

• Lots of light!
• User interface is great
• Inexpensive for a quad emitter
• Works with a 18650 tube, which would help those runtimes.
• Very well built and solid.

Cons

• Short runtimes on turbo
• Gets hot if left on turbo
• No thermal management

Final Thoughts

Nothing I didn’t say in the summary. I love this light. I think it works great and also looks great to boot. The amount and direction of light have been great for my EDC needs, and that the firmware allows me to go back and forth in mode selection is fantastic.

Parting Shot

I told you I like to do this. This is on turbo with my hand probably 5 inches away. This thing is bright!!

Two parting shots. Sorry. As bright as it is, it can also be very dim, like your boy here!!

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Notes

• This light was provided by GearBest for review. I was not paid to write this review.
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