HID recoil?

[Bushman5]

could one take a HID box (is that the term?) and reverse fire it into a parabolic reflector, kind of like what Pelican does with their Recoil series of lights?seems to me one would would get a very throwy beam.

or maybe take a bunch of HID emitters and fire them into a parabolic reflector to make it even brighter

 

[Norm]

It doesn't matter what the light source is you can pretty much use all the various techniques for focusing the light. Use a candle if you wish.
Think of an old WWII search light using a carbon arc.
Norm

 

[BVH]

I did - and look what happened!

 

[65535]

With incans and HID you don't get much improvement on output or throw with that reflector style. With filament or arc placement they are practically far enough out to achieve optimal throw.

The tank lights use the rear mounted reflector as does BVH's carbon arc. In smaller lights it's not practical to move the bulb infront rather than have it stick up.

Ra's light is a good example.

The reason a lot of HID's aren't throwier is that a high quality smooth reflector is MUCH MUCH more expensive than a cheap formed reflector or a small 20mm reflector. A high quality reflector is what throw comes from. Not so much location of the source.

 

[SemiMan]

With incans and HID you don't get much improvement on output or throw with that reflector style. With filament or arc placement they are practically far enough out to achieve optimal throw.

The tank lights use the rear mounted reflector as does BVH's carbon arc. In smaller lights it's not practical to move the bulb infront rather than have it stick up.

Ra's light is a good example.

The reason a lot of HID's aren't throwier is that a high quality smooth reflector is MUCH MUCH more expensive than a cheap formed reflector or a small 20mm reflector. A high quality reflector is what throw comes from. Not so much location of the source.

You also have the basic issue of source size versus reflector size. The smaller the size of the light source w.r.t. the size of the reflector, the better "potential" for throw. If you add in more than one light source, your source size naturally goes up, hence your throw does not get any better. That is why short-arc lights can achieve such high throw, they put a lot of lumens into a very small area.

For lasers (and even conceptually the potential exists for LEDS), this theory does not apply as they do not emit spherically but emit in one direction. Lasers already do this. There have been papers on LEDS where the emission is constrained to a single direction at the die level.

Semiman