How good can flashlights get?

Over the past 10 years the growth curve of flashlight performance has been off the charts. Before the past decade there was probably less progress over the previous 100 years. So how much longer can this rapid pace of improvement continue?

Because unlike computers flashlights have to be bound by physical limits, size, heat, surface area, etc. Barring a new technology break thru can this pace possibly continue at the same rate? I mean at this rate in 5 years you'll have flashlights the size of a tk22 pumping out 5,000 lumens. Will physics allow that? (Again barring some kind of break thru)

Who knows ? But then again, thats half the fun. Rumors of the next big thing, saving the dollars for same, and eventually having it turn up in the post. Then realizing that your new purchase has just been superseeded. Hmmmm.... sounds like forced collection. Ahh well, bring on the next five years.
Cheers.

:twothumbs

Just a couple of years ago 600 lumens was a big deal. And it was reserved only for large, multi-cell lights. Now you can have that with a single 18650. Makers are now pushing their lights upwards of 3,000 lumens, which, if you take the same rate of development means we should be seeing 10,000 lumens out of similar sized lights in a few years.

What will happen in the future is unknown. If the past is our measuring stick, the next ten years will bring us 15,000 lumen lights, and 500+ lumens from a single AA light. Runtimes will improve, and costs will come down.

Haha this progress is insane. I need to get away from you people i'm becoming one of those flashaholics lol. The only thing that will stop me from buying a mountain of lights like some people in here is that constant rumor of more power & efficiency being right around the corner.

i bought the improved TN30 XM-L2 3,600 lumen jawn as my 1st REAL beast flashlight. I'm glad i didn't find u guys 3 or 4 years ago for my 1st big purchase, that would have been like buying a house at the peak of the real estate bubble

4-5 years ago we were Wow'ed to see 100 lumens, and 500 lumens was laughable to ever accomplish. LED was just known for efficiency and not brightness.

Just waiting for that 1000 lumens from a single AAA.

Jash said:

Just a couple of years ago 600 lumens was a big deal. And it was reserved only for large, multi-cell lights. Now you can have that with a single 18650. Makers are now pushing their lights upwards of 3,000 lumens, which, if you take the same rate of development means we should be seeing 10,000 lumens out of similar sized lights in a few years.

What will happen in the future is unknown. If the past is our measuring stick, the next ten years will bring us 15,000 lumen lights, and 500+ lumens from a single AA light. Runtimes will improve, and costs will come down.

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^^^ Possibly to all the above. But definitely not with a single emitter.

HID pen light

There seems to be a charge ahead to the most lumens atmosphere in top end producers now. And I like that to some extent, but I am looking forward to lights that are geared towoard runtime also. Really hope to see the runtimes and heat sinking come along just as much as or more lumens. I am personaly hopeing for the "next big thing" to be better batteries. I would love to have an 18650 sized cell that can be quick charged and have a long life cycle (think ten's of thousands of charges) Kind of hopeing that the electric vehicle industry comes up with something dramatic the can be used in consumer electronics.

There are a theoretical limit on how bright LEDs can be, but when running at high power, we are still pretty far from this limit. Just look at Cree XM-L2, run at 10W and 85°C it has only 105 lm/W. Maybe some day we will see 300 lm/W at this power level, or at even higher power levels. Another interesting attribute is lm/mm^2, will the LEDs just grow larger, or will they be able to increase surface brightness as well as they increase lm/W?
Last but not least, what improvements will we see in battery technology, will we get Graphen based batteries with many times they current capacity?

Stock up on the latest and greatest lights, and come back when there has been a substantial improvement in technology.

Its always hard to predict this sort of thing, as breakthroughs in other sciences, etc, can typically cause a jump in performance in other fields.

LEDs seem to be limited by the fact that the LED ITSELF is emitting the light, and the surface brightness that a material can emit w/o destroying itself or what its in/on, etc....and, the available power sources.

Cell improvements are low hanging fruit to my eyes...as run time and sustained amperage are currently (heh heh) limiting factors.

Lithium ions seem to be king now, but who knows what improvements in them, or, in a new source we never heard of, might be.

There are chargers that charge cells and power devices through the air....perhaps someone will develop a wireless battery pack that you wear, and runs your light remotely.


I can take an ordinary florescent bulb and hold it, not connected to a lamp, etc...just the bulb, and it will light if I am standing under a high tension line...perhaps someone will invent a light source that is powered by ambient magnetic fields/induced electric fields?

Electric eels can generate electricity all by themselves...which means that all living things, as they all generate a small amount of electricity, related to muscle contractions, etc, have the POTENTIAL (heh heh) to also potentially be harnessed to power devices...imagine a wee snippet of that eel DNA and you are suddenly able to be the power for your electric car/bio-light, etc.....you just don't know what's possible in the future.

I suspect most of the large leaps in LED have been made already. I expect the next few years will see gradual improvements in efficiency(less heat) and max output. So now we have 850-900 lumens from a single 18650 I see this getting up to 1200-1300 in the next few years but I'd be surprised if we get to 2000 in the next 5 years.

greeny1 said:

I suspect most of the large leaps in LED have been made already. I expect the next few years will see gradual improvements in efficiency(less heat) and max output. So now we have 850-900 lumens from a single 18650 I see this getting up to 1200-1300 in the next few years but I'd be surprised if we get to 2000 in the next 5 years.

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I can't hear you, my new eel DNA is making my ears too small...

I think that it's time for the batteries to catch up to the flashlight/headlamps.

How many lumens does one really need?

Long runtimes on very small batteries is the next big challenge.

The new VW XL1 car can do over 300 miles per gallon,5 years ago we would have said no chance,1000 lumens from a single AA probably is waiting to be released right now lol.

The LED improvements have slowed down in the past year or so, there needs to be a serious breakthrough to get much more out of a single emitter.
I believe the real progress can be made on the power source end; safe, higher capacity/discharge cells, or consumer friendly super-caps.

dparr said:

How many lumens does one really need?

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My thought exactly. A few years ago, lumens were a much bigger issue. Not so much anymore. For my typical use, 500-800 lumens is plenty, and there are LOTS of lights that can provide that. I do have a number of high-output lights (2000-4000 lumens) but they are mainly for fun and occasional real use.

I'm not making the statement that "we'll never need anything brighter" - I'm merely saying that for me, the current lights are now adequate. I agree with others that battery technology is where I would like to see some improvements, but that seems to be somewhat elusive for now.

dparr said:

How many lumens does one really need?

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If you need 100 lumens to light up an area with 10 lux at 15 m distance, then you need 1600 lumens to get 10 lux at 60 m distance with the same beam profile and 6400 lumens at 120 m distance. So I don't see an end to how many lumens one need.

More Power Arr Arr Arrr...

Lurveleven said:

If you need 100 lumens to light up an area with 10 lux at 15 m distance, then you need 1600 lumens to get 10 lux at 60 m distance with the same beam profile and 6400 lumens at 120 m distance. So I don't see an end to how many lumens one need.

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When you start putting on binoculars to see what your flashlight is pointing at, you might have gone past the useful limits.

At this point, I want better phosphors, and for more companies to have thorough design and testing.

* Near-immediate output loss, with no warnings, no moon mode, no step-downs, etc., is a design failure, for a mass-market flashlight, plain and simple (IE, custom and small-run pocket rockets are not what I'm talking about). If it does not give 20% or more of its battery life on max (if multimode) in dimming output once the battery can't hack the output anymore, somebody dropped the ball (clear step-down to lower modes, and/or a battery level warning, would also be OK ways to handle it).

* Pocket-sized torches still commonly lack thermal throttling, both for your protection, and the LED's. If the whole unit weighs well under a pound, but can pull 3-5W, it should either have thermal throttling; be a custom/small-run unit; or have been extensively tested to be able to handle it without a human holding it, to make sure it will survive OK, and not become burning hot after constantly running on high, with no skin contact, for hours on end. IIRC, the Arc brown board incident was long before I even got here.

* Few torches have a good flood beam, for us non-tactical, and non-tacticool, users (ironically, proper tactical hosts are the easiest route towards getting that taken care of, right now).

* The lumen race still seems to be most important thing to manufacturers, despite technology now out there to actually let you see what you are looking at better than a few more lumens would (neutral with higher CRI than cool, and high-CRI emitters).

* Ergonomics are too often still that of a simple stippled cylinder. Proper changes in shape are categorically superior to knurling, except on very small pocket flashlights, where size matters more. Surefire and Streamlight, among others, haven't trended away from knurling/checkering as the primary grip mechanism for no reason (it's not bad to have, but too many lights are simple cylinders with knurling--my guess is to save on machining costs).

I want a better flashlight, far more than a brighter flashlight. On the whole, flashlights flooding the market today have a great deal of room for improvement, even without getting much brighter all the time.