I'm looking at a thrunite light with 1/10th of a lumen. i love my moonlight mode on the quark 2aa, its about one lumen if i remember properly. but 1/10th of a lumen, is that even useful? i can barely walk around my house with 1 lumen, I'm assuming 1/10th is nothing. do you guys have experience with the firefly mode on these lights and is it useful or ridiculous and never gets used?
I'm a moonlight snob and into testing them for output, runtime, current draw. Output/runtime specs exaggeration and sample volatility can be HUGE (multiple factors) in the sub-lumen modes, depending upon manufacturer.
Quark moonlights are consistently in the 0.2-0.4 lm range, which is pretty "bright" among sub-lumen lights. I like them in a floody (XML) 0.3-0.4 lm range which is a comfortable book reading level for me, and therefore also good for most close task work with my hands. It's too bright for completely dark-adapted eyes (i.e., waking from sleep for a bathroom run), but I use moonlight for hours on end and find I generally can only get my eyes "mostly" dark adapted. I use Quark moonlights as my general purpose low mode, and 3 lumens as my medium.
Thrunite fireflies - I have a 0.1 twisty T10 and 0.05 Neutron V2, and I find their output specs accurate (not runtime though) - are better for the midnight bathroom runs, but that only accounts for a minute or so a day, so it feels like a wasted mode slot to me. I prefer to bury a brighter moonlight in my fist and use my pinkie as an aperture control for when my eyes are completely dark adapted. I don't like TNs mode spacing though, after a dim firefly, they like to jump 100-200x to double digit "low" modes - I'm always between too dim and too bright on their lights. Interestingly, the Quark's brighter moonlights also consume less milliamperes of power than TNs dim fireflies (my samples).