Flood or Throw....

[Shorttime]

....from your keychain light.

I know, it's the eternal question with any light. So, for purposes of making it more interesting: can you come up with some numbers? How far in feet/meters/bananas?

How wide of a beam do you want, if you want flood? How far should it go if you're more of a distance fan?

I feel like twenty feet would be pretty acceptable for a keychain light, and as much flood as I can get for that distance. I do want a real even beam pattern, with no compromised "hot spot" in the middle. I understand the idea, but I would rather have a light be one or the other.

 

[parang]

I feel like twenty feet would be pretty acceptable for a keychain light, and as much flood as I can get for that distance. I do want a real even beam pattern, with no compromised "hot spot" in the middle. I understand the idea, but I would rather have a light be one or the other.

This is how I roll also.

 

[idleprocess]

Living in the suburbs on a ~⅛ acre lot, working an office job (nowadays from home), I use flood constantly: walking the dogs (on 6' fixed leashes), doing projects inside, doing projects outside, working on a vehicle. Throwers ... I dig out for my ~quarterly trips to the folks' house out in the country - and even then the sightlines are generally no more than 200 meters and there's still enough dust, humidity, pollution that I'm seeing mostly backscatter along the beam past ~150 meters.

For daily use I generally need enough light to illuminate a >30° area in the mixed lighting conditions of my neighborhood so I can easily locate the dogs' leavings, determine what sort of dietary indiscretion they're about to commit, or know what that dark spot on the sidewalk is up ahead (it's a toad often enough that I'm glad I have a light). I generally need this to reach no further than 2-3 meters. If I need to see further I've got the absurdity of turbo on the FW3A or D4 and can defeat inverse-squared through brute force out to ~30 meters or so.

 

[Shorttime]

"Defeating inverse-squared through brute-force" is a phrase I will use many times, in the future.

I was wondering about back scatter myself, especially with smaller lights that don't have the output to overcome inverse-squared in edge-cases, but I don't think it would be possible to come up with a consensus, and I don't have the maths to try and build some kind of chart (eg, if there is this much dust/fog/snow/apocalyptic blood rain in the air, you should look for this much light at this distance).

Seems like with a quorum of 3, I've mostly come up with the right answer, all on my own, in the first post. If anybody else would like to weigh in, I would welcome it.

 

[3_gun]

A key chain light should stay out of the way until needed so I stick to AAA format lights. The current is a Fenix E01v2. 5L low is good for in the car/find the key hole or about 12-15ftmax. 25L med makes finding the umbrella in the closet or making your way to the light switch easy, good for around 30ft or so. The high of 100L works for poorly lit parking areas out to maybe 60ft'ish. The Fenix claimed distances aren't very realistic. It's very much a flood with a defined center. Using a L92 will get you a boost in run time & useful temperature range

 

[idleprocess]

I should have read the line of the original post - the focus here is keychain lights.

Keychain lights definitely aren't the likes of the 18650 lights I mentioned previously. The chunkier flavours peak at perhaps 1000lm while more garden-variety are closer to 500lm; neither will sustain those levels for very long.

I've had some 3 different AAA keychain lights and the first two had relatively focused beams. This was understandable with my original circa 2005 Fenix which was lucky to be extracting 20lm from its Luxeon I emitter and thus like incandescent flashlights its aim was to achieve a useful spot intensity. Its replacement put out >80lm but was also all about as tight a beam as the diminutive 1xAAA formfactor allows. The latest is capable of a modestly better 120lm but eschews the reflector instead sporting a floody optic that produces a wide hotspot that falls off gracefully into spill with no discernable cutoff.

The other general category I've seen - li-ion USB-rechargeable - have tended towards floody output.

Neither genre is especially good at throw. For most use cases I don't see why you'd want throw in a keychain light whose use cases tend around 'I find myself somewhat unexpected in a dark place and need to find my way around or perform a close-rang task' where ~3m is the maximum distance you need to illuminate. A narrower (hah) task I can see is that of the close-up inspection light, but that seems to be more of a tool carried for the task and less an EDC keychain item ... but the market likely still fulfills that with the typical 1xAAA reflector light still optimized for throw.

 

[Shorttime]

Idleprocess, I agree with your thinking about keychain lights being a mostly general-purpose item. This 120lm Fenix of yours sounds like just the ticket. Can you tell me some names and numbers to look for?

Edit: I think I found it. Fenix LD02 V2.0, yeah?

 

[idleprocess]

Idleprocess, I agree with your thinking about keychain lights being a mostly general-purpose item. This 120lm Fenix of yours sounds like just the ticket. Can you tell me some names and numbers to look for?

Edit: I think I found it. Fenix LD02 V2.0, yeah?

Lumintop EDC01 actually.

 

[pnwoutdoors]

How wide of a beam do you want, if you want flood? How far should it go if you're more of a distance fan?

For general useful lighting, IMO I can't imagine having a light that cannot flood a ~3-4yds wide zone 10ft ahead of me and that cannot throw a bright amount of light a few dozen yards from me. I'd rather have something sufficiently stout, as well, to have some defensive utility.

Which pretty much eliminates the "keychain" varieties, for me.

 

[bykfixer]

To me a key chain light is an accessory so a 10 yard long by 5 yard wide spread in darkness is good enough. If it'll light up the trunk of my car well enough to find stuff or forward far enough to see a set of say, 5 or 6 steps……good enough.

It's a backup device ordinarily with a floody beam preferred to avoid too intense lighting on close up objects.

 

[Jean-Luc Descarte]

I can't say I have a solid opinion on this, but I've used both reflector and TIR keychain lights and enjoyed both. Currently I'm pocketing an EDC01 for tasks around the condo – its pebbled TIR beam is perfect for illuminating the staircase of my building, even at 30 lumens, or heck, even as low as 5 lumens during a power outage.