The new devices are more powerful replacements of the company's existing solar lamps, featuring dramatic increases in brightness and phone-charging capacity, at lower cost, while retaining popular elements like the flexible, hardy design.
Greenlight Planet CEO T. Patrick Walsh says the improvements are a direct response to the evolving priorities of the company's customer base. "It's been nearly 10 years since we launched the first Sun King product, and people's needs have dramatically evolved. Rural consumers today expect brighter light, on par with standard home lighting on the electrical grid. They need more power to charge their increasingly battery-hungry smartphones."
Greenlight aims to meet these requirements with the new line of modernised, high-performance lanterns. Compared to the company's previous product, the Sun King Pro 2, the new Pro 400and Pro 300 lamps have twice the phone-charging capacity and more than double the brightness. But they are less expensive, according to Walsh, thanks to improved efficiency and streamlined design. Technical improvements include higher-capacity batteries and larger 5.5-watt solar panels. New, higher efficiency LEDs can be found in all three of the new models.
The brand remains focused on reliability: the products' electronic circuitry is protected with conformal coating, preventing damage in case of occasional exposure to rain (the same water-resistant protection used in the company's previous Sun King Pico model). The new Lithium-NMC batteries, adopted from electric-vehicle manufacturers, offer nearly double the energy density of the previous lanterns' batteries: the company selected the new battery formulation to deliver a six-year lifespan under typical usage scenarios, testing them to over 1000 cycles at 100% depth of discharge.
