Most powerful standard type LED flashlight

How long do you think before they catch up and surpass glowing wires?

Well, if the Mag85 puts out even close to 1,200 lumens... I think it might be a LONG time.

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DarkLight said:
How long do you think before they catch up and surpass glowing wires?

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A long time. Even bleeding edge LEDs are two orders of magntude away from outshining dime-a-dozen incandescent bulbs.

HID's title as the incan-beater looks to be pretty safe for the forseeable future.

Standard type? I dunno, HIDs and mods are kinda exceptions to the idea of "standard". If you're talking about those lights that Average Joe has laying around, like Minimags and stuff, it's already in progress. You can already get a Dorcy for the same money as a Solitaire, and it's only a matter of time until there are lights like Arc AAAs and Peak AAAs in the same price range. Standard LED versus Standard bulb is coming along nicely if you ask me. .

If a standard flashlight is a 2D mag running xenon bulb are there led lights you can buy that are brighter in a similar package?

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DarkLight said:
If a standard flashlight is a 2D mag running xenon bulb are there led lights you can buy that are brighter in a similar package?

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Absolutely! Nearly all the Luxeon based LED lights have outputs that equal or exceed a standard 2D cell incandescent flashlight.

If I remember correctly a 2-D cell flashlight put out about 15-25 lumens of light. Nearly all the Luxeon based LED lights have outputs that equal or exceed that.

If you consider a xenon lamp the luxeon III's will exceed that.

I just hate the fact all the mfrs use different and many times NON interchangeable measurements...CP, Lumens, Lux, Candela, BCP..

I wish everyone would just stick to lumens..

well, lumens is a measure of total light output. like the "volume" of light

lux is the (peak) intensity of light. (like density) so there is a difference between the two measurements. but yeah, you only need those two measurements. I think mcd and candella measure intensity as well.

Lux, mcd (millacandella), and candella (candlepower-cd) are readily interchangable because they're intensity measurements. They're in ready use for directional light sources (such as LEDs) because they're easy to measure - point the center of the light source beam at the sensor and you've got an intensity measurement.

Lumens is total light output, and requires a much more expensive (and cantankerous) integrating sphere to measure.

There are simple forumula for converting mcd/cd X beam angle to lumens, but they're inaccurate since intensity varies over the beam profile and beam angles are generally quoted to half-intensity.

Whenever you see a light figure quoted a spherical candlepower, there's a constant it can be multiplied by to determine lumens accurately.

I can definitely see LEDs overtaking incans in the sub-100 lumens category this year.