Olight Marauder 2

Olight must have considered several things during their research. Throw and Flood. The Marauder 2 can do both, but not at the same time. You either get extreme brightness with a very wide beam, or you get throw with a very narrow, but rectangular beam.

Some people complained about the rectangular beam, and it’s probably because they aren’t used to it. I think our perception of a beam is usually round. It’s not like the imperfect beam of most zoomable/focusable flashlights. The LED for throw is in the center behind a convex shaped lens. The outer ring of LEDs are in the outer ring behind TIR optics. In the flood setting, the beam is really wide and smooth. I don’t really know what kind of LEDs they are.

The throw LED looks like an Osram W2 with the rectangular phosphor layer.

It’s quite interesting that the TIR optics of the outer LEDs and the center LED with the convex shape are all made of 1 piece of plastic.

The black little dot between the LEDs is the proximity sensor to my understanding. In the first picture it’s at 11 o clock.

• Length: 139.7 mm / 5.5 ”
• Bezel diameter:  75 mm / 2.956 ”
• Body diameter: 52.5 mm / 2.0 ”

Weight: 

• With battery:  754 grams / 26.6 oz

Powerful flashlight comparison

Size compared to other high power flashlights.

From left to right: Acebeam X80-GT, Lumintop GT3, BLF Q8, Olight Marauder 2, Acebeam X45 II.

Driver and firmware

There are 2 switches in place. 1 is for changing the beam from Flood to Throw, and the other is for turning the light on/off and changing output.

Available modes:

• There are 7 levels of output, from L1 to L7 for each beam setting.

By default, the flashlight is locked after 30 seconds of turning off. You need to dial the knob at least 90 degrees to unlock.

From OFF, locked:

• Half-press: nothing
• Single-click: nothing
• Double-click
• Rotate the knob at least 90 degrees: Unlock.

FROM OFF, UNLOCKED:

• Single-click: On to last used setting
• Double-click: Turbo
• Triple-click: Strobe

From ON:

• Single click: Off
• Double click: Turbo (another 2 clicks will bring you back to L4, even if you were in L1-L3)
• Triple-click: Strobe

Shortcuts:

• To Low: press-and-hold from OFF
• To Turbo: double-click from On
• To Strobe: triple-click from On

Mode memory:

• Yes, it memorizes the last used output, except for L7. L5-L6 will only be memorized for 10 minutes! After 10 minutes it will go back to L4.

Blinky modes menu:

• Only Strobe. You can only access Strobe from On or Off when not locked out.

Low battery warning:

• A red indicator LED will show when the light is running out of battery. Also, the output will decrease when the battery is running low.

Lock-out mode:

• By default after 30 seconds

PWM:

• Not visible by eye

Proximity sensor (Can be deactivated)

• The proximity sensor is a safety feature. Some people complained about this, and I don’t really see a problem with this feature.
• You can, however, deactivate the proximity sensor, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless your application really gets screwed up by the sensor. Anyway, to deactivate the sensor do the following
  • Turn the flashlight on
  • Click 15 times (the flashlight will turn off now). You deactivated the proximity sensor
  • Do the same to turn it back on.
• There is also a way to proximity distance, but I had a hard time figuring that out. It says to do a double click and then do a third click and hold the switch at the third click. But you have to do that really quick. Look at the video I took.

Firmware / UI Conclusion:

I like the way it is locked out, but at the same time I have accidentally pushed the knob, and then you have a wait a few extra seconds before you can unlock the light by turning the knob at least 90 degrees.

Within the box, you can find a 30W USB-C battery charger with US plug. Although the charger says: 100-240V, I was unable to use it in the Netherlands.

The Marauder 2 has its charge port at the rear rather than on the side. The tailcap can be turned to reveal the USB port. The same USB-C port is used as a powerbank.

Compatible protocols: QC2.0, QC3.0, PD2.0, PD3.0, Apple, DCP, AFC

Voltage current of charging: 5V 3A, 9V 3A, 12V 2.5A, 15V 2A, 20V 1.5A. Only with the designated power adapter.

Voltage and current of discharging: 5V 3A, 9V 3A, 12V 2.5A, 15v 2A, 20V, 1.5A.

Using the designated power adapter, you should be able the charge the Marauder 2 in 2.5 hours.

Marauder 2 Lumen measurements:

All output numbers are relative for my home-made Integrating Sphere. It is set up with an Extech SDL400 Lux Meter for measurements including a Kenko PRO1D ND-16 filter. The base measurement is done with a Convoy S2+ that has been tested at 255 lumens.

Sometimes, features are a problem. One of the things I never encountered before is a proximity sensor inside a flashlight. I am usually not very fond of this type of feature, but I actually appreciate it, because it’s a safety feature. It reduces the output when an object is close to the flashlight. This could be a person, but it could also be your bag!

(You can actually turn that feature off, scroll back up to the YouTube video, where I explain how to do this)

That being said: I couldn’t measure output in Flood mode in an integrating sphere, since the sensor senses the object (integrating sphere) and therefore reduces the output directly. (Now I can though with the sensor turned off). So I couldn’t measure lumens and runtime the normal way. Only after doing some crazy testing, and errors, I realized that the proximity meter only is used for the Flood settings. booo.

For Spotlight lumens, I used the integrating sphere for this. My measurements were quite a bit higher than the specifications.

After quite a bit of trouble, trial, and error, I learned that you can actually turn off the proximity sensor. So I repeated the test, and these are the numbers. They are slightly lower than done by the ceiling bounce test. I still trust these more than the ceiling bounce test I did before.

Olight Marauder 2 battery life / runtime

The following runtime shows the highest output in Throw mode, in Candela, not lumens. This is probably a more important datapoint than lumens for this setting.

Take the following graph with a grain of salt. It was using the ceiling bounce technique, but they should represent the actual runtime graph at least a bit.

If you look at the 3 graphs, you see that L5 is actually doing the nices output from 25 minutes onward. It produces about 3500 lumens just short of 3.5 hours.

I also tested cooling, and the drop clearly shows a different between non-cooled vs cooled. Have a look at the L7 runtime below:

Olight Marauder 2 alternatives

For the following beamshots I used a Canon EOS 5D Mk2 and a 50mm lens. manual settings: ISO1600, 1/4sec , F4, 5000K

The shed is about 65 meters / 71 yards away. 
The fence is about 200 meters

Below pictures show the shed again at around 65 meters/70 yards. And the bottom 3 images show a fence and some trees at 200+ meters.

Canon DSLR, 50mm, f4 ,1/4sec, ISO1600.

You can compare the following:

• Olight Marauder 2 vs Lumintop GT3
• Olight Marauder 2 vs Acebeam X45 II