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Pelican Auto-Sensing LED light shield review
12-30-01
From the back of the package:
Pelican's New Shield Light with a patent pending Auto-Sensing light feature is the ultimate in a lighting and protection device for your Game Boy(R) Advance. As you move from a well lighted area to an area with poor lighting the shield will sense the change in lighting condition and turn on your light, flooding your GBA screen with a wonderful non-glare light. In addition, the latest White Light Technology allows for full illumination of your GBA screen. When it come[sic] to lighting your GBA - no other device comes close to GBA Light Shield with Auto-Sensing.
Physical/Hardware Properties
The newly upgraded light shield from Pelican is fairly similar to it's earlier incarnation hardware-wise. The shield still provides excellent screen protection when closed, but unfortunately it is quite a bit bulkier since it is powered by it's own power supply
(a triple A battery). The shield attaches to the GBA by clipping onto the 2 screw holes that are on either side of the cartridge slot, and also uses the pegs to snap into the 2 rectangular holes that are on the top of the GBA. This version, in my opinion, is a lot easier to snap on and remove than the older version was.
Lighting Properties
The new light shield includes 2 improvements that were originally implemented into the old light shield by users of this(gbalight.com) site: a white LED, and a diffusing lens. So everyone out there who contributed to this site with diffusing ideas, and who have furthered the LED research and information gathering, give yourselves a pat on the back... apparently the original manufacturer took our ideas and released a new version of their old product, but alas, they still cannot get it right!
The new shield is an improvement over the older version, but not by much. Since they did in fact use a diffusing lens, the LED is noticeably dimmer (see the paper test photo), and in turn kind of defeats the purpose. Pelican should have known this from reading the research and results on this site though... we discovered of course that the diffusing lens did get rid of the "halo" effect, but also cut down considerably on the overall light output. So that was definitely a design flaw in the new shield as far as it's lighting properties go. Next, what the heck is this "auto-sensing" feature all about? Why do I need a photo light sensing cell to tell me when I need light or not? I thought that's what my eyes were for? In my opinion the "auto-sensing" feature is completely useless and even laughable. Yeah, what a joke. The shield does come pretty close to the modded version however, so I guess it's not all that bad. Take a look at the pictures below and see for yourself.
Potential
When I first read about the new light shield I had a lot of ideas of hacking the circuit or modding it somehow to make use of it's self-powered advantage over the old shield. But guess what? It appears that Pelican has gotten wise to us hacking their old light shield and it seems that they assembled this one without screws! Seriously, there appears to be no way of getting this thing open short of taking an exacto knife to edges of it! Could it be a conspiracy against those of us who want to mod their inferior products or just a coincidence? You decide for yourself :) Anyway, I plan to get this thing opened up sooner or later and take some voltage and current readings. There's always a potential to mod a product, you just need to find the right angle.
Conclusion
Well, if you've read the news story from yesterday concerning the other "new" light shields (the ones that still use the incandescent bulb, but use a new limited voltage circuit to power the shield), then you can see the potential problems to mod a shield per the instructions on this site (with the radio shack LED that is).
To clarify, the problem is that the newer shields that Pelican is producing supply less voltage than the original ones, so what that means is that when you install the radioshack LED into your shield it will be a lot dimmer than if you installed it into the older version that put out more power.
ANYWAY, if you want the brightest light out there, get the Glowguard. If you want the best compromise between a "usable" light, and decent screen protection get the new LED version of the Pelican shield, and lastly but certainly not least: If you want the BEST light available (until the portablemonopoly.com frontlight kit is available that is!), and the BEST screen protection then get a hold of one of the older Pelican shields and mod it with a radioshack or nichia LED!
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