Alright, I love my AAA LS and am looking forward to ordering a LS4-P when they become available. (the Surefire L4 is just a bit big to carry around for me)
I'm pretty impressed with the current state of flashlight technology relative to what I was used to (M*g lites). But, in the end, they're just the means to an end of augmenting our natural vision which really doesn't see terribly well in the dark.
I don't really see any technology on the horizon that will make displace flashlights. Image intensification generally either sucks, or is sort of bulky and really expensive, and has a narrow field of view. Thermal imaging isn't really the same thing but has its uses.
So, in the end, we are still left with creating artificial light as one of the best means of seeing in the dark.
Current LED technology is pretty good, and better in some applications than incandescent. But it still has a ways to go. It doesn't scale as well as incandescent and although more effecient, is still inefficient. I'm hoping eventually they'll find better ways of producing white light from a LED rather than coating a blue LED.
Battery technology is still stuck in the stone age. We've been using the same battery types for years, and lithiums aren't clearly better than other types. This doesn't matter too much for flashlight use I suppose; even if a 10x better battery was invented, 50 hours is only so much more useful than 5 hours in a small EDC light. I have hopes for fuel cells here but I'm not sure how well they'd do in this type of application. Time will tell.
In the short term, I'm looking forward to seeing new, more powerful LEDs that run cooler, more white, and more efficiently, and I'd really like a rechargable lithium ion battery that can be swapped out with a standard-size battery if needed.
But, it's hard to tell. Humans aren't getting any better at seeing in the dark, so the need for flashlights is always there.
Just some rambling /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
I'm pretty impressed with the current state of flashlight technology relative to what I was used to (M*g lites). But, in the end, they're just the means to an end of augmenting our natural vision which really doesn't see terribly well in the dark.
I don't really see any technology on the horizon that will make displace flashlights. Image intensification generally either sucks, or is sort of bulky and really expensive, and has a narrow field of view. Thermal imaging isn't really the same thing but has its uses.
So, in the end, we are still left with creating artificial light as one of the best means of seeing in the dark.
Current LED technology is pretty good, and better in some applications than incandescent. But it still has a ways to go. It doesn't scale as well as incandescent and although more effecient, is still inefficient. I'm hoping eventually they'll find better ways of producing white light from a LED rather than coating a blue LED.
Battery technology is still stuck in the stone age. We've been using the same battery types for years, and lithiums aren't clearly better than other types. This doesn't matter too much for flashlight use I suppose; even if a 10x better battery was invented, 50 hours is only so much more useful than 5 hours in a small EDC light. I have hopes for fuel cells here but I'm not sure how well they'd do in this type of application. Time will tell.
In the short term, I'm looking forward to seeing new, more powerful LEDs that run cooler, more white, and more efficiently, and I'd really like a rechargable lithium ion battery that can be swapped out with a standard-size battery if needed.
But, it's hard to tell. Humans aren't getting any better at seeing in the dark, so the need for flashlights is always there.
Just some rambling /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
