Shining Some Light On Flashlights
You would be hard pressed to find a house that doesn’t have at least one flashlight stuffed away in a desk or kitchen drawer. All too often, though, those lights have burned out bulbs and dead or missing batteries. When the power goes out and you need a light, it can be really disappointing to repeatedly click the switch on your flashlight and have nothing happen. Thankfully, flashlights have come a long way over the last few years. On a good, modern LED flashlight dead bulbs are a thing of the past and they can run for days on the same set of batteries.
Comparing flashlights recently got much easier with the adaption of the ANSI/NEMA FL-1 standard. Over a dozen flashlight manufacturers got together and agreed to test their lights using the same procedures in their labs for things like output, battery life and beam distance. As long as the companies that make the lights follow the FL-1 standard, the numbers on the package are reasonably comparable between different brands. However, since two flashlights with similar numbers can produce quite different real world results, we’ve included some situational tests to give you a feel for how the lights perform in use. Each light was used to illuminate a fallen tree at a distance of fifty feet on its highest power setting and to read a map at its lowest power setting. The included photos should give you a better idea of how the lights perform, when you consider them in context, with the standardized lab data. Below, we will take a look at a spread of mostly LED lights at different price points. The flashlight market has exploded with new companies and models in recent years, but the seven lights below are some of the best ones I’ve found when considering cost, quality and features.
The classic American flashlight found in toolboxes and kitchen drawers would have to be the Mini Maglite. This light is on the short list of units still made in the USA and has been, all the way back to when it first came out in 1984. When it came out, it was a technological marvel. You could turn the head to have both a spotlight and a floodlight option. Twisting the head all the way off would let you use it like a candle for lighting up the inside of a room or tent. If you only want to invest about ten bucks into a flashlight, then the Mini Maglite is still one of your best bets for a really well-made unit. But, this will only buy you fourteen lumens of light for around five hours of runtime per set of batteries. The beam distance, the distance the light will project to 0.25lux, is rated at 96 meters. That is just fine for an around the house light, but not an impressive runtime by more modern LED standards. But, the body of a Mini Maglite is built like a tank and about the only way to kill this light is to leave a dead pair of AA batteries in it until they leak. The weakpoint of this and most other incandescent lights, though is the bulb. The Xenon lamps that power this flashlight are tiny and quite fragile. There is, thankfully, a spare bulb hidden in the tailcap of the light, under the spring. Spare bulbs come in a two packare tingn around twofor ttreedCollers.Itu would be a goor idea to arau a fw.s I’vesteen Mini Maglitts forsales recently in a“bonuso pac”p ofshorps thatseven included antexrad pair of bulbs in thelbos.
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