4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Think the Mag Solitare is great? See the light and read this review!
Date of Review: Apr 22, 2003
The Bottom Line: There are better lights out there. Buy them. I'd choose any white LED based keychain light over the Mag Solitare.
The Mag Solitaire was the keychain light, running off one AAA battery with a small krypton bulb (Spare in the tail) and being shock proof and water proof and featuring a small body with a continuous diameter (Doesn't get bigger at the head). That was 10 years ago.
Now days there is new technology out there, called LED or light emitting diode, these little silicon chips replace fragile, glass bulbs with nearly indestructible hunks of silicon and epoxy that give off literally hours and hours of bright, white light with nearly flawless beams.
The Mag solitaire uses an older Krypton bulb that gives off white light, for about the first 5 minutes you've got a battery in there, followed by an hour or two of quickly dimming, yellow light. The beam is focusable but is full of "artifacts," that is, holes in the beam of light. The bulb is highly susceptible to shock, if you drop it there's a good chance you'll burst your bulb.
So if the Mag is so terrible what do I recommend? Well spend about $5 more and step up to the Photon 3 by LRI. It is much smaller than the Solitaire and uses a microprocessor controlled, dimmable LED. It's waterproof, shock-proof, nearly indestructible, and looks great on your keys. Or even better yet spend about $30 (That's right, spend $30 for a FLASHLIGHT) and step up to my personal all time favorite flashlight, the Arc AAA It looks like a Mag solitaire only it's actually smaller, and uses a rugged, indestructible LED. Instead of the 5+ parts of a Mag Solitaire it has 2--a body and a sealed head. It uses a tiny step up circuit to boost the voltage from 1 AAA up to the voltage necessary to run a white LED and gives you a good 8 hours of continuous, bright, usable white light (Even more if your usage is intermittent) followed by several hours of "comfort light," that is, light that isn't necessarily bright enough to walk around with, but would be bright enough to keep you from going insane in an emergency situation where you may find yourself in the dark.
So because it uses outdated technology to give a terrible, yellow beam and because there are much better keychain lights out there (I'd choose ANY White LED-Based keychain light over this one) I give the Mag Solitaire a shinning 1 star.
