Even funnier is if you take an alkaline and a zinc ("heavy duty") battery and hit the sides of them together, the alkaline one will dent the zinc one.
Honestly idk why there's not been any effort by conservationists to ban the sale of zinc chloride batteries. They're effectively just landfill using up somewhat valuable resources.
Was there another battery at some point that "heavy duty" batteries were actually better than? My earliest memories were basically Duracell and energizer. Maybe there was an even weaker one?
Heavy Duty batteries are just the old types that they had before alkaline batteries came out. They work, it's all the world had for decades, but they don't work nearly as well as modern types.
Sort of. The Zinc Chloride Heavy Duties are just the āperfectionā of the original Zinc batteries developed in the 19th century. They use Zinc and Carbon. They are cheaper to manufacture than alkaline batteries and are decent enough for low draw uses like IR remotes and quartz clocks.
Dodgy flashlights have been making absurd claims about their outputs for decades. I worked in patrol security, a flashlight was a tool of the trade, so we were all to some extent flashlight nerds.
I remember back when I had a 180 lumen Fenix L2D. Fenix was a reputable brand, it was a measured 180 lumens, back when 220 lumen was about the maximum output of a single LED. We had guys do a group buy of some supposed 600 lumen flashlights, and they were all woefully underpowered compared to mine - probably around 60 lumen. I remember one dumb fuck insisting that his was brighter, even when it was obvious that mine absolutely washed his out every time I turned it on.
Fast forward about ten years, I bought an Olight Mini Mk II - if you've ever seen the "ladies, hear me out" meme, it's the one from that. 1020 measured lumens, way too bright for any reasonable use case. I wasn't working in security any more, but I was having a chat with a local ranger one night who showed off his new flashlight. He turned it on, it was about 300 lumen, he claimed it was 10,000 lumens because that's what it said on the package.
Y'know, pepper spray might've been more effective, but tactical flashlights offer lots of extra utilities.
2300 lumes to the eyes are effective for a few seconds, which is not much compared to a spray, but it has better distance (even in daylight, especially indoors / at night) and a hard head.
It's also good for normal use, either for dark places or to break windows in case of an emergency
Sometimes you just want to set your pants on fire, which lights with that kind of output absolutely will do.
I have an Emisar D4 that's rated something like what the guy you responded to is talking about. It's a floodie, not a spot, so it's like turning on the sun and just setting it down while you try to perform brain surgery before the safety kicks in and it drops out of turbo mode.
I will say that being able to light up a large area for a few minutes can be useful, on occasion. For the most part, a single LED powered by a 14500 will handle anything I need.
They're still good lights, you can still buy a new Fenix and get a perfectly serviceable, high quality flashlight. It's just that their specs all seem to be a couple of years behind Olight.
Purchasing was kinda their big downside. Fenix the manufacturer was a separate entity to Fenix the web store, the website was a reseller with a reseller agreement for North America. This meant that I actually bought my Fenix flashlights from the 4Sevens website for cheaper and quicker delivery. 4Sevens also made their own flashlights, which suffered from the same slowness to adopt new bulbs when they came out.
I believe - and please, consider all of this post to be the recollections of a middle-aged man on things that happened over a decade ago - that some of the Fenix designers split off to make Olight and 4Sevens. After this, Surefire sued them for patent infringement, which hammered them a little, and only Olight really came out of it on top.
I use Fenix head torches for ultramarathons, very reliable and powerful with interchangeable batteries that are easy to find, also very reasonably priced! They are one of those brands I recommend to newer runners. I also use a Fenix for my pushbike.
Don't forget the mismarketing of the mAh rating of the shitty batteries that go in the flashlights. Them ultramegafire 18650 batteries claiming 5000 mAh, no such battery exists.
I've been most happy with my Wurkkos FC11 I bought 4 years ago for $30. Just wish sometimes it had a button on the end for patrol. But the magnet on the end is handy when I'm working on my car.
I have a three or four olights. The newest one I got I am not happy with it. Itās the Baton3 Pro Max in neutral white. It has a sensor in it where if it detects reflected light, it assumes itās too close to an object and dims itself down. I donāt really care for that. I work on a lot of mechanical stuff and need to get close with a bright light.
I was reading the reviews to some hiking headlamps recently. One of them had a sensor, and one of the negative reviews was from a rock climber. Gonna be honest, the mental picture gave me a bit of a chuckle.
I tried buying a mag-lite a little while ago as a present for someone, but I found it a bit lacking for the price because they still used incandescent bulbs
Back in the 90s, they were alright. They had a novel flood-spot adjustment, they were reliable, large battery flashlights with a decent incandescent bulb that put out 50~60 lumen, and the entire thing doubled as a baton if you needed one.
But they haven't innovated since then. They came out with a fairly unremarkable LED version, but an LED bulb needs optics as well as a reflector, and LEDLENSER had the patent on the optics that would work with Mag's flood-spot adjustment.
I still have a 6D maglite floating around somewhere, plus a 4D and 3D. I carried the 6D on shift with me when I did patrols. I pulled it out ready to hit someone with it a couple of times, but never actually had to hit anyone. People tend to back down when you pull out a maglite.
Olight are my personal favourite, but LED Lenser and Surefire make some good flashlights, and I'm sure there are a whole bunch of other manufacturers put there that are high quality - I haven't looked for a new flashlight for a few years.
As a general rule of thumb, good manufacturers primarily sell through their own website, and their websites will run you through the modes and ergonomics as much as they mention the peak lumen output.
Peak lumen output nowadays is relatively unimportant - most of them are bright enough, you're probably not going to benefit much from 2600 lumen compared to 1000 lumen, as dust reflection makes the further reaches of the throw difficult to make out anyway. Peak lumens is a "hard factor," it's easy to put a number on, what makes a good flashlight is the "soft factors," like how quickly you can change modes, can you turn it from off to full brightness, can you turn it from off to low brightness. I've seen lots of hikers with 4000 lumen flashlights that can't turn straight on to a lower mode, so they pull it out at camp and blind everyone in the three seconds it takes to turn it to low mode.
The Olight Warrior 3 Mini looks like a good choice. The Seeker 4 has direct USB-C charging, but I'm personally not a fan of multi-LED torches. I recommend looking for "tactical" flashlights.
Not really, unfortunately. I haven't bought a new flashlight in years, and I don't tend to go for the budget options.
Olight and Fenix are having their Black Friday sales at the moment, and have a few good lights going cheap. I have looked through their current lineups in response to this thread kicking off; it's hard to explain but Olight seems too modern and Fenix seems outdated. Seriously, one of Olights best models has a useless fucken' laser beam, and Fenix still has micro-USB charging ports.
Wuben is a brand I've heard of but never used, but their PL01 seems okay as a budget option. It comes with a 10880 lithium battery (the size of two AAA batteries stuck together) and the battery itself has built-in USB-C. It has a protruding rubber clicky button on the bottom - I prefer recessed for something I may put in my pocket. It seems to indicate that it cycles through from low to bright modes, which is what you want. Personally I would prefer a second switch or a way to go straight from off to high with one long click, but starting low and cycling to high avoids accidentally blinding yourself. It's not perfect, but it seems okay.
Man, I work on/with wildland fire helicopters and the fenix lights are great for strobing a helicopter from a mile away through smoke in the daylight, and they're so damn compact and have pretty decent battery, love that thing.
I appreciate that this sounds like an "and then everybody clapped" story, but I swear it actually happened.
When I first got my LD20, our local firefighters were still being issued Dolphin flashlights. I had a skip bin fire at one of my sites, nothing major, and it was put out with a firehose on site. Afterwards, we were walking back to our vehicles over this dirty great big patch of construction sand. When I turned my flashlight on, the firefighter was blown away by it - he even turned his flashlight on and off a couple of times and laughed about how you couldn't even see his beam. Keep in mind, I've got a little metal thing powered by two AA batteries, he has this big metal flashlight powered by a 6V lantern battery.
When we got back to the vehicles, he asked me where I got it from and how much it cost. A few weeks later, they were being issued their own. I'm not sure if they were using exactly the same model I had, but they all seemed to have these powerful little black LED flashlights - at the very least I think my example persuaded them to have a look at the modern options on the market.
I have an olight mini 2! It's really phenomenal for my work in maintenance. Clip it on your belt, pull it off, and you can comfortably hold it with you lips not needing to bite it and drool/gag after a minute
But yeah I've held one of those handheld commercial super spot lights that took like 6D batteries and that was insane, but now a Wuben C series can compete with one 18650 and 3oz
I want you to know I just wasted $13 ordering that flashlight because of you.
My biggest pet peeve about my phones flashlight is that thereās no option to lock it on, so when holding it in my hands I inevitably press the button to turn it off.
1020 measured lumens, way too bright for any reasonable use case.
The most reasonable use case is when someone tailgates you with their bright lights on. A quick flash or two of that light helps them to reconsider their choices.
The AV sets I do in a giant convention center donāt even take up 100,000 Watts. 78 million pixels of LED wall doesnāt use 100,000 watts. That flashlight wouldnāt even be able to flicker with a single low voltage battery.
It's like Rick Sanchez's jury-rigged laser from the pickle episode. Each AA battery is expended in under a second but whatever is in front of you gets third degree burns. Get the right kind of collimator and you'll blow through an engine block in a single shot.
In case anyone was wondering, at 100% efficiency, this would power the light for roughly 0.1404 seconds, which is actually longer than I would have guessed.
Thats not even possible. Its 1.5v you would need that battery to be able to handle 66,666.67A to put out 100,000W. As a reference point most people's house service is 200A. A AAbatterys internal resistance is somewhere between 1.5ohms. It would be capable of putting out roughly 1A. Wattage is voltage times amperage so 1.5W is going to be roughly what youre actually getting. You might get a little more or a little less but youre not getting anywhere close to 100,000w it would explode in your hand well before you got even close.
We ran the math for this. 100 kW provided by a 1.5V battery means there's 66,666.6 Amps running through that flashlight, A.K.A. enough current to fry an elephant. Assuming 800 miliamps/hour (capacity of a higher end AA battery), you'd get about 12 microseconds of light before the battery gave out.
But it's heavy duty! š
Which is hilarious because heavy duty batteries last about 1/4 of the time standard alkaline batteries do.
If they last that long before leaking and ruining whatever they are in.
My thought is.. make the product ten cents cheaper and donāt sell me your poopy battery.
Even funnier is if you take an alkaline and a zinc ("heavy duty") battery and hit the sides of them together, the alkaline one will dent the zinc one.
Honestly idk why there's not been any effort by conservationists to ban the sale of zinc chloride batteries. They're effectively just landfill using up somewhat valuable resources.
Was there another battery at some point that "heavy duty" batteries were actually better than? My earliest memories were basically Duracell and energizer. Maybe there was an even weaker one?
Heavy Duty batteries are just the old types that they had before alkaline batteries came out. They work, it's all the world had for decades, but they don't work nearly as well as modern types.
Sort of. The Zinc Chloride Heavy Duties are just the āperfectionā of the original Zinc batteries developed in the 19th century. They use Zinc and Carbon. They are cheaper to manufacture than alkaline batteries and are decent enough for low draw uses like IR remotes and quartz clocks.
So they are heavy duty only compared to 19th century battery tech. No one alive really remembers batteries that are weaker.
Exactly. They are heavy duty compared to stuff your great great grandparents used.
sounds like this flashlight works by exploding the battery anyway š
Step on over to r/flashlights to see some examples of some super heavy duty flashlights that can catch shit on fire.
It's doing its best š„ŗ
Dodgy flashlights have been making absurd claims about their outputs for decades. I worked in patrol security, a flashlight was a tool of the trade, so we were all to some extent flashlight nerds.
I remember back when I had a 180 lumen Fenix L2D. Fenix was a reputable brand, it was a measured 180 lumens, back when 220 lumen was about the maximum output of a single LED. We had guys do a group buy of some supposed 600 lumen flashlights, and they were all woefully underpowered compared to mine - probably around 60 lumen. I remember one dumb fuck insisting that his was brighter, even when it was obvious that mine absolutely washed his out every time I turned it on.
Fast forward about ten years, I bought an Olight Mini Mk II - if you've ever seen the "ladies, hear me out" meme, it's the one from that. 1020 measured lumens, way too bright for any reasonable use case. I wasn't working in security any more, but I was having a chat with a local ranger one night who showed off his new flashlight. He turned it on, it was about 300 lumen, he claimed it was 10,000 lumens because that's what it said on the package.
I have olight warrior s3 with 2300 lumens (measured as you'd probably know), not even working in security š¤·
For what, friend?
I expected this question much sooner lol
I bought one 2 years ago when stuff got more dangerous in my country, but now just for fun I guess
I presume you intend to cook any intruders face with that much power ?
Y'know, pepper spray might've been more effective, but tactical flashlights offer lots of extra utilities.
2300 lumes to the eyes are effective for a few seconds, which is not much compared to a spray, but it has better distance (even in daylight, especially indoors / at night) and a hard head.
It's also good for normal use, either for dark places or to break windows in case of an emergency
I canāt get the picture, but the intruder would really be the image of a screaming baby made of ash.
Kinda wanna know which country now
Hope you stay safe brother.
So he can see
Sometimes you just want to set your pants on fire, which lights with that kind of output absolutely will do.
I have an Emisar D4 that's rated something like what the guy you responded to is talking about. It's a floodie, not a spot, so it's like turning on the sun and just setting it down while you try to perform brain surgery before the safety kicks in and it drops out of turbo mode.
I will say that being able to light up a large area for a few minutes can be useful, on occasion. For the most part, a single LED powered by a 14500 will handle anything I need.
What happened to Fenix? I have two of their flashlights from quite a while ago and they're still great. Are they no longer as good?
The market moved quicker than they did.
They're still good lights, you can still buy a new Fenix and get a perfectly serviceable, high quality flashlight. It's just that their specs all seem to be a couple of years behind Olight.
Purchasing was kinda their big downside. Fenix the manufacturer was a separate entity to Fenix the web store, the website was a reseller with a reseller agreement for North America. This meant that I actually bought my Fenix flashlights from the 4Sevens website for cheaper and quicker delivery. 4Sevens also made their own flashlights, which suffered from the same slowness to adopt new bulbs when they came out.
I believe - and please, consider all of this post to be the recollections of a middle-aged man on things that happened over a decade ago - that some of the Fenix designers split off to make Olight and 4Sevens. After this, Surefire sued them for patent infringement, which hammered them a little, and only Olight really came out of it on top.
I use Fenix head torches for ultramarathons, very reliable and powerful with interchangeable batteries that are easy to find, also very reasonably priced! They are one of those brands I recommend to newer runners. I also use a Fenix for my pushbike.
Don't forget the mismarketing of the mAh rating of the shitty batteries that go in the flashlights. Them ultramegafire 18650 batteries claiming 5000 mAh, no such battery exists.
I've been most happy with my Wurkkos FC11 I bought 4 years ago for $30. Just wish sometimes it had a button on the end for patrol. But the magnet on the end is handy when I'm working on my car.
5,000 mAh 18650 batteries? Pfft, rookie numbers.
Here's a set that are 12,000mAh.
(For people unfamiliar; the highest capacity 18650 batteries are around 3,600mAh, and those only come from brands you've heard of).
This guy flashlights
I'm actually pretty impressed by the replies to this one; it seems a few of us flashlight.
I have a three or four olights. The newest one I got I am not happy with it. Itās the Baton3 Pro Max in neutral white. It has a sensor in it where if it detects reflected light, it assumes itās too close to an object and dims itself down. I donāt really care for that. I work on a lot of mechanical stuff and need to get close with a bright light.
I was reading the reviews to some hiking headlamps recently. One of them had a sensor, and one of the negative reviews was from a rock climber. Gonna be honest, the mental picture gave me a bit of a chuckle.
I tried buying a mag-lite a little while ago as a present for someone, but I found it a bit lacking for the price because they still used incandescent bulbs
Maglites are whacking sticks.
Back in the 90s, they were alright. They had a novel flood-spot adjustment, they were reliable, large battery flashlights with a decent incandescent bulb that put out 50~60 lumen, and the entire thing doubled as a baton if you needed one.
But they haven't innovated since then. They came out with a fairly unremarkable LED version, but an LED bulb needs optics as well as a reflector, and LEDLENSER had the patent on the optics that would work with Mag's flood-spot adjustment.
I still have a 6D maglite floating around somewhere, plus a 4D and 3D. I carried the 6D on shift with me when I did patrols. I pulled it out ready to hit someone with it a couple of times, but never actually had to hit anyone. People tend to back down when you pull out a maglite.
What flashlight brand would you recommend in this day and age? I'm tired of my mediocre flashlights.
Use case is pretty much forest and checking properties for robbers/intruders. So something sturdy that I can rely on but also clean looking.
Thanks
Olight are my personal favourite, but LED Lenser and Surefire make some good flashlights, and I'm sure there are a whole bunch of other manufacturers put there that are high quality - I haven't looked for a new flashlight for a few years.
As a general rule of thumb, good manufacturers primarily sell through their own website, and their websites will run you through the modes and ergonomics as much as they mention the peak lumen output.
Peak lumen output nowadays is relatively unimportant - most of them are bright enough, you're probably not going to benefit much from 2600 lumen compared to 1000 lumen, as dust reflection makes the further reaches of the throw difficult to make out anyway. Peak lumens is a "hard factor," it's easy to put a number on, what makes a good flashlight is the "soft factors," like how quickly you can change modes, can you turn it from off to full brightness, can you turn it from off to low brightness. I've seen lots of hikers with 4000 lumen flashlights that can't turn straight on to a lower mode, so they pull it out at camp and blind everyone in the three seconds it takes to turn it to low mode.
The Olight Warrior 3 Mini looks like a good choice. The Seeker 4 has direct USB-C charging, but I'm personally not a fan of multi-LED torches. I recommend looking for "tactical" flashlights.
"1 million candlepower"
Question for an expert... I guess...
Any recommendations for good flashlights on a budget?
Not really, unfortunately. I haven't bought a new flashlight in years, and I don't tend to go for the budget options.
Olight and Fenix are having their Black Friday sales at the moment, and have a few good lights going cheap. I have looked through their current lineups in response to this thread kicking off; it's hard to explain but Olight seems too modern and Fenix seems outdated. Seriously, one of Olights best models has a useless fucken' laser beam, and Fenix still has micro-USB charging ports.
Wuben is a brand I've heard of but never used, but their PL01 seems okay as a budget option. It comes with a 10880 lithium battery (the size of two AAA batteries stuck together) and the battery itself has built-in USB-C. It has a protruding rubber clicky button on the bottom - I prefer recessed for something I may put in my pocket. It seems to indicate that it cycles through from low to bright modes, which is what you want. Personally I would prefer a second switch or a way to go straight from off to high with one long click, but starting low and cycling to high avoids accidentally blinding yourself. It's not perfect, but it seems okay.
The flashlight sub usually has good recommendations. I've followed them several times and been happy. Wurkkos and Sofirn have treated me well.
Man, I work on/with wildland fire helicopters and the fenix lights are great for strobing a helicopter from a mile away through smoke in the daylight, and they're so damn compact and have pretty decent battery, love that thing.
I appreciate that this sounds like an "and then everybody clapped" story, but I swear it actually happened.
When I first got my LD20, our local firefighters were still being issued Dolphin flashlights. I had a skip bin fire at one of my sites, nothing major, and it was put out with a firehose on site. Afterwards, we were walking back to our vehicles over this dirty great big patch of construction sand. When I turned my flashlight on, the firefighter was blown away by it - he even turned his flashlight on and off a couple of times and laughed about how you couldn't even see his beam. Keep in mind, I've got a little metal thing powered by two AA batteries, he has this big metal flashlight powered by a 6V lantern battery.
When we got back to the vehicles, he asked me where I got it from and how much it cost. A few weeks later, they were being issued their own. I'm not sure if they were using exactly the same model I had, but they all seemed to have these powerful little black LED flashlights - at the very least I think my example persuaded them to have a look at the modern options on the market.
I have an olight mini 2! It's really phenomenal for my work in maintenance. Clip it on your belt, pull it off, and you can comfortably hold it with you lips not needing to bite it and drool/gag after a minute
But yeah I've held one of those handheld commercial super spot lights that took like 6D batteries and that was insane, but now a Wuben C series can compete with one 18650 and 3oz
I want you to know I just wasted $13 ordering that flashlight because of you.
My biggest pet peeve about my phones flashlight is that thereās no option to lock it on, so when holding it in my hands I inevitably press the button to turn it off.
The most reasonable use case is when someone tailgates you with their bright lights on. A quick flash or two of that light helps them to reconsider their choices.
r/flashlight
10000 lumens š¤£š¤£š¤£ I could take an X-ray with something like that
nuclear powerplant in a battery
precious tritium
r/raimimemes is leaking
No fucking way thatās anywhere close to 1kw, so 100kw is laughable.
nah, see: there's 67 thousand amps going into the bulb, and it drains the battery in about a millisecond
6-7?
100000 kW / 1.5 V = 66666.6 A
The internal resistance will limit it to 0.75-1.5 A
It's a special edition Kodak 1.5v zinc capacitor obvi
so 6-7?
Oh shit, I see it now. Yeah, you're right.
six seven?
its between 6 and 7
but i just realised there has been some antimeme i didnt knew before, that was not meant
You are the least funny person on this planet
For reference a standard VW 1.9 TDI engine generates about 77kw
So what you're saying is I can engine swap a VW with this light and get more HP off the line? Sign me up
Yes, it's called "light drive" extreme weight to power ratio
LIGHTSPEED!
r/carscirclejerk is leaking
My gaming PC doesn't use 1,000 watts, and it has a power supply like 10x the size of this entire flashlight
The AV sets I do in a giant convention center donāt even take up 100,000 Watts. 78 million pixels of LED wall doesnāt use 100,000 watts. That flashlight wouldnāt even be able to flicker with a single low voltage battery.
FLASH-light. Only lasts for a flash.
Dude it clearly it says:
MOOOOOāļø
oh yeah actually, i would never notice that
TBF, Camera flashes can hit that as an instantaneous peak. But I prefer to believe what /u/Tangled2 said and it reads MOOOOOāļø
It only works for a quarter second. Basically a reloadable flashbang
Fucking flash grenade, you get 1 (one) round of photons out of it
[removed]
It's like Rick Sanchez's jury-rigged laser from the pickle episode. Each AA battery is expended in under a second but whatever is in front of you gets third degree burns. Get the right kind of collimator and you'll blow through an engine block in a single shot.
Just requires 66 Kilo-ampere to run that at 1.5 volt š«£
It's like those 700 Decibel car horns you find online, if it was true and you used it a blackhole would be created š
In case anyone was wondering, at 100% efficiency, this would power the light for roughly 0.1404 seconds, which is actually longer than I would have guessed.
Surprising given that I get about 1000 flashes that last a tiny fraction of a second on a 300w strobe with huge batteries
That battery would be pushing 66.666 ā A
Easy, all you need is 0.000022 ohm resistor
Thats not even possible. Its 1.5v you would need that battery to be able to handle 66,666.67A to put out 100,000W. As a reference point most people's house service is 200A. A AAbatterys internal resistance is somewhere between 1.5ohms. It would be capable of putting out roughly 1A. Wattage is voltage times amperage so 1.5W is going to be roughly what youre actually getting. You might get a little more or a little less but youre not getting anywhere close to 100,000w it would explode in your hand well before you got even close.
wow,thatĀ“s 32W in decimal! So, with 1 1.5V battery with 700mAh, it would work 2 minutes!
I bought a pack of 3 for like 2ā¬ when my lights go out they still work fine tho after 7-8 years.
We ran the math for this. 100 kW provided by a 1.5V battery means there's 66,666.6 Amps running through that flashlight, A.K.A. enough current to fry an elephant. Assuming 800 miliamps/hour (capacity of a higher end AA battery), you'd get about 12 microseconds of light before the battery gave out.
The only company I actually trust the claims of in regards to flashlights, is LedLenser.
Mostly due to the fact, that I actually sold them, and actually tested quite a few of their models (and all had the power they claimed they did)
Huh, I bought one of those about 10 years ago for a couple of bucks. Funny, it didn't seem like 100,000 watts of light.
By my math it would drain that battery in 0.14 seconds.
Eh thatās only 66,666 amps!
You're reading it upside down, it's calling you a
MOOOOOLYep. We know what this is.
Aah yes a casual 66,666.667A draw
That double A is clinging on to dear live omfg
Thanks I hate how """Kodak""" lets no-name manufacturers put its name on landwaste
How many milliseconds do you get out of each battery?