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Olight sent me a Baldr Pro R to test and evaluate. Taking it out of it’s packaging, I noted that it looked very much like my Valkyrie PL-2 albeit with a magnetic charging/control pad and without a battery door latch. It is approximately 1/2″ longer than a Valkyrie PL-2 and about 11g heavier at 126g.
The Baldr Pro R differs externally from the older non-rechargeable Baldr Pro which has its laser designator unit encased in housing below the main light. The newer R-model is a much more elegant design with the laser internal to the unit with only a small hole in the flashlight bell from which the laser beam emerges.
It shares identical main controls with both the Valkyrie and Baldr Pro. Two button/pads at the rear of the unit can be actuated by an index or middle finger of either hand. A quick double-tap switch the light from high and low output. Strobe mode is activated by simultaneously pressing both control buttons. A control ring near the crown of the unit, switches between light-only, laser and light, and laser-only modes.
It fits a standard Glock pistol (and pistols with a similar accessory rail), with a Glock (GL) sized cross-bar pre-installed on the mounting base. This cross-bar can be replaced with a Picatinny 1913 sized bar for more exacting fit on that mounting system but the standard GL cross-bar is compatible with Picatinny slots. I particularly like the O-lights latching system as it provides much faster mounting and detaching than either a Streamlight or Surefire taclight.
Conducting my home-made lumen testing, I usually let a light warm-up for 1-minute before starting my tests. Initially my readings placed the output at around 1880 lumens! But I discovered that after a little more than a minute, the Baldr’s output would drop and stabilize at around 680 lumens. I repeated my tests and noted the same drop at approximately 1-2 minutes of running the light on high mode. I hypothesized that the unit may have over-heating safety built into it as the unit was getting quite hot.
I contacted the Marketing Rep at Olight and she shared with me a chart from their engineers showing that at High mode, the device would go from 1350-500-300 lumens. Upon checking the manual, sure enough the performance diagram showed that a fully powered unit output 1350 lumens for only 1.5 minutes before it stepped down to 500 lumens for the next 40 minutes of run-time before dropping to 300 lumens for the final 13 minutes.
So the Baldr is really a 500 lumen light with a brief over-drive mode of 230% and not truly a 1350 taclight. Unfortunately this is an all-too-common marketing ploy by flashlight companies nowadays. That’s why you can’t take the lumen numbers at face value or at least look at the fine print (the Baldr’s packaging says 1350 Max Output),
In all other respects the flashlight worked flawlessly. The built-in green laser was bright and I could see it clearly at 120ft away at night. The laser can be turned on in conjunction with the light and easily seen in both high and low flashlight modes (though more easily in low). Checking with a laser bore-sighter, the unit was also perfectly sighted to my Glock 17 when I first mounted it; the laser can be adjusted for both windage and elevation with the included hex wrench.
Despite the misleading lumen numbers, I am impressed with the overall ergonomics and build of the Baldr Pro R. I’ll be mounting it on my personal sidearm (Glock 17 Gen3) for long-term testing.
