Peak 3 LED AAA - Is this normal?

I am in the process of checking out this light.

First, I must say that the snow white LED's are great. I am very tired of the blue tint on several of my other smaller LED lights. This light is quite white with just a barely noticeable hint of blue in the center. I have a brass light and the brass gives a bit of yellow reflection at the edges of the beam. I think this is very appealing. My wife even mentioned that this light looked "almost normal."

Peak has a real winner with these LED's.

I am in the process of checking battery performance and at 13 hours noticed that the 3 LED's are operating at different brightness level. At 16 hours, the two dimmer LED's are now about equal in brightness, with the third LED quite a bit brighter.

Is this normal?

Has anyone taken one of these apart to look at the circuit?

Tom

I've got a 7led 123, It does the same thing. Forward voltage, I am guessing. I would also guess they're not exactly the same brightness at full power, but you just can't notice it.

This is a perfectly normal characteristic of a multiple-LED flashlight or other multiple-LED installation, and should be ignored. The Vf of each individual LED can vary slightly, even among LEDs from the same wafer.

What a great thing to estimate battery capacity!

I like that.

Back in a former millenium, you could match LEDs only for a specific current. This was important for multi-level flashlights.
That means that they were pretty close at full power, but had big differences at lower levels.

Thanks, I thought VF might figure into this.

It is amazing how long you can run this light on an Alkaline battery. I am at 35 hours and it is still going, but is very dim. There is enough light to see obsticles in a completely dark room, but that is about it.

Two of the LED's dimmed down first and they are barely glowing now. The third LED is hanging in there at about 0.5 candela.

PeLu,

I am not sure how effective this would be for checking battery capacity. I did not notice the difference until well into the test. I judge useful battery capacity over when the light falls to half brightness. This light was at half brightness at about 2 hours. The difference in LED brightness was not noticed until 16 hours.

Tom

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SilverFox said:I am not sure how effective this would be for checking battery capacity. I did not notice the difference until well into the test. I judge useful battery capacity over when the light falls to half brightness. This light was at half brightness at about 2 hours. The difference in LED brightness was not noticed until 16 hours.

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I thought because it is much easier to tell relative brightness versus absolute.

If I switch on my light I'm unable to say if it is full or half brightness without comparing it to something else.

But I can easily tell if two LEDs are about at the same brightness (lets say 10% difference or less) or more than 30%.

Of course it is not an intended feature and it will be very different among lights, but it can be useful.