The Flashlight Thread

[hellosailor]

Delancey, Amazon screws up regularly and the great thing is, they make good on it.

If they sent you the wrong anything, contact them (there's an email contact link buried on there) and tell them WRONG PRODUCT or DOES NOT MATCH whatever the problem is. They will generate a prepaid return label for you and replace it with the right product. No cost to you.

As to glow in the dark being gimmicky? Not, not on a dive light. The legacy of dive lights is that they always overvolt the bulb (pre-LEDs) and as a diver you can and do expect the light will burn out on you while you are diving, so you always carry at least one backup. How do you find the backup light when everything has just gone black?

Right, you look for the glowing stuff.

Not a gimmick but an incredibly functional feature.

Not so bad in a blackout, either, as many of them will have enough glow to be seen once your eyes accommodate, even if they weren't in direct light. OTOH if you're planning to steal a yacht or rob a house...they're the wrong light for you. (G)

[socaldmax]

Originally Posted by Cormorant

I keep one of these on my keychain. Very bright for its size, and waterproof. I find I use it two or three times a day to see stuff in dark corners. Very handy to have one on you at all times everywhere.

BTW, sold on Ebay for about $7.
Search for "1800 LM Cree XM-L T6 LED Keychain Flashlight"

That looks pretty cute!

What kind of battery does it use?

[who_cares]

Who uses flashlights anymore? You can get a sweet Petzl headlamp with a red setting for 30 bucks, waterproof, great battery life, 3 brightness settings and a strobe setting, all you need for sailing.

[Delancey]

Have fun picking out channel markers at night with your headlamp.

[who_cares]

Originally Posted by Delancey

Have fun picking out channel markers at night with your headlamp.

Done that, wasn't fun, but it wasn't horrible either. I think a high powered LED spotlight is definitely the right tool for that job, but the OP was asking about flashlights, not necessarily spotlights. 90% of the time all you need is a headlamp

[klmmicro]

Headlamp is great for just about anything you need light for on the boat. Once you need range and lots of lumens, a hand-held becomes a very nice tool to have! I have a 1100 lumen C8 LED torch that works wonderfully out to about 75 odd meters. It is a great squid attractor too once tied up and tossed over the side.

[Neptune's Gear]

best thing I've seen to find channel markers with reflectors is a green laser! Just have to be sure no-one is in its path, or its a small one that won't damage vision. 500 meters is no problem for them....

[forcemajeure]

As a result of this thread, we've had a lot of phone calls and email questions regarding the Marinebeam Ultra Long Range Illuminator, so I thought I would respond with some of the details to clear up some confusion.

We have licensed an amazing technology that, while amazingly simple, completely changes the way an LED flashlight works. Its benefit isn't really brightness (flux) per se, but actually the opposite. What it does is create extremely high-lumen density (lux), and incredible beam distance (650M FL1 distance), with very little total light energy (only 300 lumens). It does this by having no wasted spill-over light whatsoever. In other words, every photon it produces is going down range. The best analogy is a laser beam,which uses only tenths of a watt, and has almost no flux, yet can blind a person at several hundred yards.

The big benefit for us as boaters is that you now have a handheld searchlight which out-performs a 2800 lumen LED, but uses about a tenth of the power. So you now have a handheld super powerful searchlight which can operate up to 120 hours on 3 D cells. With this flashlight you can legitimately pick out buoys 750 yards away.

Here is the cool part. It is a technology that everyone can understand, and is amazingly simple. The technology is just a simple optical collar with a hole in the middle, which is positioned in front of a standard CREE LED chip. Its sole duty is to reflect ALL of the spillover light back onto the LED emitter itself, which re-excites the phosphors on the chip, which then re-emits, and sends the new photons straight out the hole in the collar. So, any stay light gets collected by the collar and is sent back to the chip itself, which continues to re-emit and collimate the light thru the center collar and down range. This cycle, is no perpetual-motion device, but much more like a turbocharger on a car, which takes waste heat and recycles it to increase the energy density. Same here. The wasted energy (stray lumens), are collected, and then concentrated and collimated to provide higher lumen density (lux) and a more coherent beam.

So, how is it different than just focusing light with a lens? Well, when you focus a light it has a focal distance, meaning the light converges up until the focal point, at which point it diverges again. The result is the flashlight beam we are all familiar with. You see a bunch of concentric halos of light, hot spots, etc. Imagine now, that with coherent, collimated light, there is no focal point. In fact, imagine that at any distance the beam is truly in focus. This is what happens with the Marinebeam Illuminator. Its light beam is always in focus, very concentrated, and has no spillover, hotspots, etc. While there are plenty of standard flashlight lenses that produce unfocused light, they are not very efficient, and they all have the issue of spillover light, hotspots, etc., and you still need almost 10 times the lumens to get the same beam distance.

While our flashlight and lens is round, the beam is square. Why is this? It is simply proof of the absolutely collimated beam projected from our light. The light projected on a surface (at any distance) is square because the light you are seeing is actually an image of the LED chip itself. in fact, if you point this light at a sailboat 200 yards away, you will see the actual image of the LED chip on its sails. You can even see the solder joints on the chip!

The other cool thing is that if you point it at a distant object, that object will be the only thing illuminated. Other boats, or people, won't even see the beam.

This is no ordinary LED flashlight. The technology allows a much more useful long-range light, that uses very little power (and the batteries last a long long time). Having said all of this, this is not a general purpose "flashlight", and you likely wouldn't use it for walks on the beach or for general illumination.

Jeff

[hook682]

Google Nebo O2 Beam.....


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[Tomi]

yep the 3 D cell Maglite - also useful as entry deterrent....

[forcemajeure]

Originally Posted by hook682

Google Nebo O2 Beam.....

I'll say upfront, that my purpose here is to clarify the questions people had as a result of this existing thread, and not to get into a flashlight war, comparisons of brands, or a sales pitch. The Nebo O2 you refer to is the traditional TIR type lens approach that I mentioned above in my post. This is where lenses are used to refract and reflect the light out towards the target. While it has a nice TIR lens technology, there is no light recycling going on whatsoever with that beam, and this is why it still needs 420 lumens to go 250M, rather than 300 lumens to go a certified ANSI FL1 distance of 670M.

Apples and oranges with respect to what I was trying to explain for the callers from this thread who were trying to understand our technology.

Hopefully that clarifies things a bit.

[hellosailor]

So Jeff, you are using a reflector to concentrate the normally wasted wider beam from a conventional LED, and a collimator similar to the type used on a conventional laser diode, and basically treating the LED (with reflective collar) like a laser diode, to send out a narrow collimated beam.

Is that economical only for big expensive spotlight? Or can it be applied to the under $25 "two D cell" flashlights as well?

[deckofficer]

Originally Posted by forcemajeure

I'll say upfront, that my purpose here is to clarify the questions people had as a result of this existing thread, and not to get into a flashlight war, comparisons of brands, or a sales pitch. The Nebo O2 you refer to is the traditional TIR type lens approach that I mentioned above in my post. This is where lenses are used to refract and reflect the light out towards the target. While it has a nice TIR lens technology, there is no light recycling going on whatsoever with that beam, and this is why it still needs 420 lumens to go 250M, rather than 300 lumens to go a certified ANSI FL1 distance of 670M.

Apples and oranges with respect to what I was trying to explain for the callers from this thread who were trying to understand our technology.

Hopefully that clarifies things a bit.

I have no doubt that your light gives the tightest beam at a long distance for the least whr used. The fact that the projected image matches the square footprint of the LED confirms this. For those that want to spot channel markers 1/2 nm away without losing their own night vision (or others), your rather expensive light has no rivals.

But then for us Tim the Toolman types, whip out the lathe (don't we all have a metal lathe in our engine rooms? lol) and roll your own. Might take 10 minutes to recover your night vision though.

[campuscab]

Streamlight scorpion and 4 d cell mag light with led bulb. . The streamlight is super bright and the mag will burn for many hours.

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