Fish eye lens for maglite?

Does such a thing exist?

I did a cree conversion ages ago on my D cell maglite but the focus is rubbish now and you can only focus it to a spot, if you want a flood light it just turns into a halo/ring of light around a dark hole.

Now, I've got a couple of focusing cree torches and they have fish eye lenses and the focus system works fine. I presume the lens is the key to a good flexible beam change.

Does a fish eye lens exist for the maglite to make use of the focus once more?

AutoTech said:

Does such a thing exist?

I did a cree conversion ages ago on my D cell maglite but the focus is rubbish now and you can only focus it to a spot, if you want a flood light it just turns into a halo/ring of light around a dark hole.

Now, I've got a couple of focusing cree torches and they have fish eye lenses and the focus system works fine. I presume the lens is the key to a good flexible beam change.

Does a fish eye lens exist for the maglite to make use of the focus once more?

Click to expand...

That's basically how all mags are. New, old, incanescent, Luxeon, Cree, it doesn't matter.

As far as a fish eye lens, do you mean an aspheric lens for more throw? Or a lens to create a large even wall of light?

Hi John, I didn't realise they were all like that to be honest. I was given the light years ago and it's only recently (since buying better lights) that I've even thought about it. Maybe it's just exagerated with the cree?

My thinking (probably wrongly) was that the fish eye lens stops this donut effect. It certainly does (to a greater extent than the maglite) in my cheap focus equipped cree torches.

It just seems all the focus lights have this type of lens, therefore I assumed someone would have produced them for maglites.

What you're looking for is a TIR optic, but I don't think they make them this big. Spot-to-flood isn't really useful unless you have an optic, so I would just keep it in spot focus. Even my new ML125, which has a newly designed reflector, has the same donut hole. It's just a characteristic of smooth reflectors.