North wind- I didn’t choose the most expensive source; I chose a trusted source who I’ve ordered from before. If you know of a cheaper source for decent quality li-ion battery/charger then good for you. Personally I’d rather not order li ion batteries and chargers through ebay

Incidentally:

Magicshine 4.5Ah battery £38.94
Gloworm 5.8Ah battery £45

Not too dissimilar to the Smudge battery.

RicB – I think you chose the source to validate your price 😉

Which is almost double what you’d pay from other reliable sources…I didn’t buy my charger or batteries from Ebay got them from Fasttech. Research on the Candlepower forums and elsewhere indicated they were reliable for both.

>Unfortunately, believe it or not, the Chinese have figured out how to make fake CE labels!! My burny Belkin and Dell charges were enough proof of that<

Yeah that was my fist instinct – I gather its very commonplace for Chinese manufacturers to churn out and apply these labels whether they have the certification or not.

Lies, all lies I tell you! 😉

Scary stuff with the CE marks though

that is why it feels safer to buy from a non-chinese company that may use chinese manufacturing, but at least does some QA on top.

My own X2 is is in a black housing, and it switches low to mid to high without a strobe mode, is this the same as everyone elses? there seem to be a couple of variants floating about. Is it true as posted elsewhere that the Red anodized X2’s actually switch High to Low with a Strobe mode?
Sounds like they assembled different production batches with different drivers, what colour was the one sent to smudge?

My X2 is red and goes low, mid, high then strobe if you hold button on, so they are’nt all the same it would seem.

Mine is the same as above ^^^^

Unfortunately, believe it or not, the Chinese have figured out how to make fake CE labels!!

I don’t doubt it.
Good reason then to buy from a reputable company that sells internationally through real distributors, rather than some anonymous bloke off of eBay.