Maglites never went south because they were crap from the start, the old 6D incan was 120ish bulb lumens... the things reliable as a 40series landcruiser mind you. Put a dolphin torch German Phillip's super bulb in them for 240ish lumens. Put a 500 or 700lumen pelican bulb with glass lens, alloy reflector, and high cap d size ni-mh and you got the mother torch. Old school warm white.
Mentioning lumens by itself is rather meaningless, you have to take into account beam pattern, coverage, activity, etc.
Sorry to say the lumen numbers on virtually all led products are BOGUS!!!!!!!!!!!! The fl1 standards are rubbish
On the side of my klarus xt32 box it says 1200lumens, and for 3hrs (irrc) runtime.
So naturally anyone would think 1200 lumens for 3hours right? Nothing could be further from the truth.
In reality all LEDs cant run at high outputs without active cooling (driving lights get it for free), so within 10mins at RT its output is ~90%, at 20mins ~70%, it slowly drops and holds until cells are near empty than drops to 10%. Utter rubbish
Headlamps too, acebeam h30 is advertised as 4000lumens, yet can only do 1000ish sustained in most temps.
LUMENS:
Before lumens there was candlepower, and the two prevailing themes were a-people thought somehow it was the only thing you needed to judge a light...b- the numbers went from exaggeration to fabrication. Once people caught on that the numbers were meaningless they turned to lumens. Sadly history repeats.
Lumens means how much lux (light) falls on a surface and is useful with flood beam outputs and less useful with concentrated beams. But still lumens means little to the average joe. When looking for a quality headtorch for cooking and hiking as an example you want to pay more atn to the coverage in degrees, lux gradient, color temp etc. So trust me most head torches are garbage used for cooking but most are unaware.
An isotropic light source emitting 1candela at 1meter radius will produce 12.56lumens, basic childs math from a sphere. However lights have reflectors and only way to measure lumens is by a polysterene box with diffused filters and a lux meter against a know source. Beware of posers using the term luminous flux to make themselves seem smarter than they are
COLOUR TEMP and RENDERING
One major short coming of leds is most are cool white and many find them to be chite straight up. They use them coz it is easier to source are can boast larger lumen numbers to the muggles.
Leds use phosphorous layer to convert the near uv light to something we can see, lower color temps mean more layers and losses. we see "best" with ~4200kelvins given that has the most yellows and greens. But 6000k has less of it and looks bad. Same story for 3000k and below, however 2500-3000k does give a mellow relaxing feel which I like and have converted much of my stuff to 3000k.
Most leds are plagued by tiny shifts, unwanted colours like yellows, greens etc
CREE is chite, there high cri stuff is barely any better than their low, yes they make powerful stuff, but quality ain't really it.
To give good color rendering you need to produce more of the reds and cyans etc, which means more added high heat and that is what high cri does and they have noticeably less lumens but much better quality of light. To me once you get over 4000k the hi cri starts to look less noticable.
CANDELA
This is how far the light "throws" and is measured in the brightest part of the beam. The fl1 std is 0.25lux which is pathetic. My klarus xt32 throws 0.25lux at 1km in its center beam but just 500meters using 1lux, as a general rule for lights that throw very far you actually need to increase the lumens massively to see anything with naked eye. Math
Candela (isotropic) = lumens ÷ (4xpixr2)
Throw= sqroot (candela over lux)
Klarus example= 250,000cd, at any given distance (not too close to light) lux can be calcd.
For my standards of 10lux it only throws 158M. Big numbers attract the masses.
Candela=candelpower lol.
BATTERY
The days of aa, alkaline, c, d sizes, nimh etc are over, they are so poor in runtime. The gold standard has been li-ion 18650 for many years, but now the new kid on the block is 21770, 25-30% more energy with only ~10% more added thickness to the housings.
Always buy a light that has acess to the cells or you will be in a chite down the line. Never waste your time on canned batteries. Always always buy quality brand cells, the big 4 are panasonic/sanyo, samsung, sony, and LG. Always buy the cells from flashlight stores for protected and vaping sources for unprotected. Vaping is serious business and they dont tolerate cheap nasty stuff that could lead to a fire, there are so many fakes out of places like China so dont waste your time. Li-ion comes in two types,
High capacity and High power.
High capacity 18650 starts at around 3000mah and they age fast under abuse.
They are usually 3300mah max in real world, any higher is just datasheet bs. Olight advertise 3600 for a 3300cell lol.
Sony vtc4,5, and 6 are high power and these cells are used for cold temps and are ideal when running low modes continuous (cells not heating=high IR) Li-ion can be used reliably down to about negative 15C, any lower and time to break out the cr123a primary's.
CHEAP vs. QUALITY
as a general rule the cheap stuff is getting better but is limited to low outputs and crap batteries. They are for people who barely use lights and have no ability to see the difference. Guys cant tell the diff between hd600s and dr dra beats....yet others can spot it a mile away. As they say it takes alot of extra effort to get a noticable increase. Quality brands use quality electronics, high ip ratings etc.
Cheap stuff is usually direct drive basic conponents.
I could go on and on but I think I touched on the basics. As mentioned head torches are now serious business and I use them more than a handheld. Just about anything out there works well, there are dozens of top tier brands all out of china of course making so many lights it's getting ridiculous. Overtime they all get better. I choose the klarus xt32 as its imo the best all round light to do it all and coupled with the acebeam h30 it's a wicked combo. Now if I want I could break out the ff5 for those times to scare the pants off of guys dumping rubbish.
