Solus SU-500 Review

Review of the Solus Submersible Products SU-500 Light
By Simon Powell



I first found out about Solus' products at the Birmingham Dive Show back in October 2005 - they had with them a prototype version of their SU series light and I was very impressed with it. I'd been conversing with the manufacturers over the last few months, and I was offered a SU-500 model to test before committing to a purchase. Obviously, I took them up on the offer - so here's my review.


What's in the box?

When it arrived, I opened up the box, and found a whole load of components - there was the lamp and battery unit, a charging docking station, charger unit, power lead, Goodman handle, and even a few spare fuses for the charging lead.



Construction

The SSP lights are some of the best engineered pieced of dive kit I've seen. The lamp head is machined out of aluminium and anodised, as is the battery canister - both components are “sealed for life” meaning that there are no user serviceable parts in the entire lamp assembly. The lamp head is about the same size as my Custom Divers 10W HID, and the battery is the same length, but a little wider. Considering that the output of this unit is competing with 21W HID models, the size of the lamp unit is excellent, because with a HID of that size, you would need quite a large ballast, making the lamp unit rather large and unwieldy.


The Solus package is really neat - they do a version for helmet mounting, the SR-500 which doesn't have the handle part, just the emitters; there's no way you could get HID lighting of a similar output in such a small package without a remote ballast. The switch is a rotating collar that has a wonderful, positive click into the positions of [OFF] - [ON: full power] - [OFF] - [ON: half power]. The cable connecting the 2 parts is proper marine grade submarine cable, which I have been told is gel filled so if it gets cut, no water will ingress into either the battery or the light head. Everyone I showed this lamp too let out an “Ooooh!” or an “Aaaah!” when they felt the quality of the construction.



Technology

The lighting technology is marketed as “Solid State Light Engine”, which in layman's terms translates to state-of-the-art-LED. The light head uses 6 LEDs in an array, with each LED incorporating a prismatic reflector to focus and direct the light forward with minimum loss.


Charging is done through the base, using contacts on the outside of the battery. The docking station incorporates a location pin to ensure correct alignment and a small magnet, which ensures that the contacts are “dead” unless the unit is docked, so this gets around any problems with salt water on open contacts.


Within the unit are electronics which monitor the battery and will switch off half the LEDs when the battery gets dangerously low on charge (giving 25 mins of low-power light), it also includes a thermal shuts off for if it's run for too long out of the water. The 5Ah battery is good for 5 hours on half power and 2.5 on full - this implies that the light engine draws one amp on half power, or two amps on full power - with a 12V pack, this is 24W of power consumed on full power or 12W on half. The light output of the SU-500 model is apparently 500 lumens on full power - almost all of which is within the visible spectrum, with invisible UV levels being very low.

On discussion with the manufacturers, a 21W HID actually draws about 24W due to the ballast, and similarly a 10W HID pulls about 12W again due to the ballast - so from a runtime and intensity perspective, the full and half power settings can be compared head to head with a 10W and 21W HID respectively. Being solid state, there is none of the fragility issues associated with a filament or HID bulb, which in a rough, diving environment is perfect.


Testing

I had access to my trusty old Custom Divers 10W HID, which I have been very pleased with over the few years that I've dived with it. I was able to do some comparisons of colour temperature, beam pattern and brightness both in and out of the water to see how the unit performed. Basically, I was incredibly impressed with what I found. Out of the water, the LED unit pumped out more light on it's low setting than my CD 10W HID. The colour temperature is much closer to daylight, as can be clearly seen by the apparent colour of the grass (about 10m away from the lamps) in the picture below showing the HID on the left and the LED on the right (please forgive the poor photos, but they certainly illustrate the brightness and colour of the beam). The second picture is with the Solus unit on high power.


After a rather conclusive test out of the water, I wanted to see how the beam penetrated in the water, so I went for a dive with Paul (pchanning of back mounted counterlung fame!) in Firestone bay out of Plymouth. It was my first dive from there, so it was an interesting experience too. We dropped in, and headed off towards the wall - it was early evening, and so it would be dark by the time we got out of the water - a good test. I had my CD 10W HID and the SU-500 strapped to a single Goodman handle, so I could compare directly both units. We descended to about 45m, it was pretty dark, but we had visibility of about 6-8m which was quite pleasant. I descended with both torches turned on - the SU-500 on its half-power setting, and it was immediately apparent that the HID was severely lacking! Once on the bottom, I did some comparisons of the HID, and the LED unit on both power settings, and the Solus performed very well - the beam was very nice and even with no hotspots, the beam angle and spread was very similar to the CD HID (about 13 degrees I think?), penetration through the water was also as good as the HID, and the colours were considerably warmer with the LED. Paul had his Greenforce 10W HID unit, and it performed similarly to the CD, either units beam was washed out by the Solus if one was placed over the other. The following weekend I was again diving out of Plymouth, and this time there were a few more torches on the boat for me to try a comparison against – including both an 18W and 24W Salvo. I bumped into Gary and Rob at various points during the weekend dives and had a little test. Both the Salvos had focusable heads and when they had their units focussed into light-sabre mode then the penetration through the water was superior to that of the wider spread Solus, but when the beams were dispersed into a similar beam size, I must admit that the difference was barely noticeable – maybe the Salvos just had the edge, but it was certainly a very close run thing.

From a cost comparison perspective, the price is comparable to a 21W HID. The higher power model, the SU-1000, is comparable to a 40W HID in output, and I don't know of a manufacturer who makes such a model, so it could well be the brightest dive light out there…


Summary

So, to conclude: It's price points puts it directly against equivalent HID lights, the build quality is absolutely second to none, the technology gets over the robustness issues associated with HID without sacrificing performance and no ballast means a nice compact head, I could not find anything to criticise, only positives. I used to be sceptical of LED lights, but this unit has really blown away my preconceived ideas and proved to me that LEDs will be the way that lighting will go in the future. The SU-500 rocks, and I don't want to give it back - now I'd like to get my hands on the SU-1000!



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