How Bright? Compared to......

UnknownVT

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Dec 27, 2002
Messages
3,671
How bright are our flashlights?

When compared to things we know.....
like daylight/sunlight?
or normal indoor lighting?

With light meters one can do this quantitatively and get absolute measurements -
but it's hard sometimes to visualize numbers and what they mean......

Yet, I find beamshots - even side-by-side comparative ones that I do helps but still doesn't quite tell the whole story.

So how bright are some of our typical flashlights?

HowBright.jpg


While we have a very clear bright day here in Atlanta - bright sunshine, no clouds in the sky, at approx 3:00PM EST I took a bunch of flashlights outside along with a sheet of regular white copy paper with typing/printing on and compared the flashlights to the daylight/sunlight.

First the direct sunlight on the paper was WAY too bright for any comfortable reading - I literally wore sunglasses to do this ad-hoc experiment.

I used a tape measure and held the flashlights - moved/played them side to side and tried to see the hotspot on the sunlit paper. Noted where the hotspot merged, and could not be distinguished anymore. Did this several times to confirm the approx position/distance.

Compared to good bright Sunlight ~3PM EST March/10/2005 - Atlanta - bright sunny, cloudless -

from dimmest to brightest -
ArcAAA ~ 3"
MJLED ~ 10"
S1801 (1w Luxeon) ~ 14"
MXDL (3w luxeon copy) ~15"
Streamlight Scorpion (xenon) ~36"

For a more practical level I used a more repeatable trial of a more normal but bright reading intensity - a 60watt soft-white bulb in a table lamp (a flared lamp housing/shade with the insides white - kind of like a "reflector") - set 3feet away from the same white printed paper. Again I played the lights on the paper looking for when the hotspot merged and became indistinguishable from the bulb illumination.

This was actually much harder due to the distance and beam coverage involved - I had to be sure I wasn't seeing the flashlights illuminating up the shadow areas - and it was actually the paper surface being compared..... anyway here are some approximate measurements:

Compared to table lamp 60-watt soft-white bulb at 3 feet away -

ArcAAA ~7.5ft
MJLED ~19ft
S1801 (1w Luxeon) ~26ft
MXDL (3w lux-copy) ~26ft
Scorpion (xenon) ~36ft (+?)

So there you go...

as I've always said Brighter does NOT always = Better.

Since a xenon light like the fabulous Streamlight Scorpion is very bright - it really needs to be more than about 30ft away for good comfortable reading.......

even the dimmest light here - the ArcAAA really is still a bit too bright for comfortable reading - needing to be more than about 6ft away....

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