If anything, the throw of incandescents is a factor that works in favor of LEDs. To be sure, throw has its uses in some situations.
Let me know if I'm reading this right, and excuse the exaggeration to boil it down:
Throw is unimportant and useless except in the rare occasion of... xyz. For all intensive purposes, flood and/or spill is all that matters in a flashlight.
If inclined, please elaborate.
In
most qualities that matter in a flashlight, LED is superior. But IMO, LED is not superior, always, all the time. I myself see this, and if I had to have one or the other, I'd have to go with LED. But we cannot allow ourselves to completely dismiss a long standing quality of flashlights before practical LED arrived, pretty recently.
Besides throw, another quality that matters in the comparison between LED and incan is the literal quality (the kind) of the light, the photons themselves, their wavelength and temperature, in relation to what sunlight is. One or two LED manufacturers, at the bleeding edge, are closing in on this or have already. Every other LED manufacturer has NOT. Until ALL LED is of the quality of a CRI in the 90's ranges, this cannot be ignored, because a single great LED (say the Nichia 219 series, or the decent offerings from Cree) does not in any way improve the performance of all the other inferior LEDs, which is most of the current market, nor what you'd beforehand expect from a random LED before you saw it/tested it. You can't say rationally that, excuse the metaphor, a combustion engine vehical is inferior in all ways that matter to an electric vehical because the quickest electric vehical will always beat the quickest gas vehical, because the 0-60mph times are not the only consideration that matters.
For an LED flashlight to be great, it actually redefines what a flashlight is... no longer a simple circuit, not your fathers' flashlights. Technically, a great LED flashlight is really a computer. Well, my ancient grizzled 32-year-old Apple //e blows any LED flashlight out of the water... the comparison is ridiculous, of course. But the point is, to be any good, LED has introduced complexities into the manufacture and use of flashlights that was never there before. More complexity usually means more fragility, and more expense (but not always). But I realize... wow, look at what we have gained. Still, it is important to note this fact in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (see what I did there? there is science and it is distinct from technology, there is history of science that is distinct from history of technology, and philosophy of each is altogether a different thing, these are not the same disciplines, but I'll lump them all in together for brevity, the way the vast disciplines in a wide field are reduced down to one all encompassing idea or term, such as "medicine" is whether talking about a doctor, or technician, simple instrument or complex machine used in that field).
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Why the images? The point is that LED and incan are different. We're comparing motorcycles to cars. The last image is a subtle point. I hope you get it, but this will break your LED flashlight, forever, maybe all LED flashlights at once, and there's little you can do to protect it from ever present cosmic rays, but this will have little or no effect on an incan flashlight. edit: Because our atmosphere absorbs
most x-rays and gamma rays from coronal mass ejections, sunspots, solar flares, and supernova, terrestrial electronics are
fairly safe from these extraterrestrial and cosmic rays. The electronics in satellites are not protected if they orbit higher than Earth's magnetosphere.
source of one of the images, PM has great stuff, just put here for enjoyment of all, but no point being made by me posting the link:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tec...scent-vs-led-ultimate-light-bulb-test#slide-1
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I just thought of another decent metaphor. An incan flashlight is like a typical human (all too human), while an LED flashlight is like an android from sci fi, idealized and "perfect." But Star Trek's Data strongly disagrees.
It burns!!
