FlashlightReviews, Lumens, Innova lights

Hi:

I have read all the stuff here about how they do their "overall output" ratings:

http://www.flashlightreviews.com/features/output_vs_throw.htm

I have no arguments against the use of the crude integrating carton. In fact, it should be possible to get a reasonable correlation with lumens using this apparatus. And in fact, lumens seems to be approximately 1.43 times the overall output value.

What puzzles me is that a Innova T4 (according to Briteguy) and a Surefire L2 are supposed to produce 100 lumens. But they have widely differing overall output values of 27.0 vs. 89.0 respectively on FlashlightReviews..

Also, the Innova XO3 and T3 are slightly higher than the T4, even though the former are rated 80 lumens vs. 100 for T4.

Do Innova T3/T4 do 80/100 lumens or are they much less?

Does Innova have a home page?

Thanks!

Well, first of all, it's Inova with a single N. THat might help in doing searches.

What the difference in output comes down to is, some manufacturers rate their lights honestly while most over-rate them. Inova's 80 Lumen rating is probably closer to about 45.

Their website hasn't been updated in quite some time.

cratz2 said:

What the difference in output comes down to is, some manufacturers rate their lights honestly while most over-rate them. Inova's 80 Lumen rating is probably closer to about 45.

Click to expand...

Isnt that illeagle though? False advertising. Espically with them doubling the lumen rating? (I can understand 10 to 15 lumens over.. But doubling? Thats a bit much I think)

I'm sure it's illegal... but the only people that have the kind of money that would be required to do something about it would be another light company and then that other company would have a negative connotation because of hurting the other company and/or putting employees out of work.

Comes down to this... Not many people that have the ability to do their own research should honestly believe that the T3 can put out the same amount of total light as the L2 regardless of what Inova claims and furthermore, Surefire doesn't really cater to those that would think the T3 and the L2 are comparable lights.

The problem is there is not led's measurement standards, as in other kinds of lighting, and is the way to sell by "marketing", no by good products.

That would be another way to say it Kinnza... I didn't want to be quite that harsh. In my estimation, here is the problem... So many of the cheap light companies (think Nuwai as the most expensive cheap company) over-rate their lights... That leads the upper end companies to a delima. I think any given flashlight company has to decide whether they want to follow the low standard set by the bottom dollar companies (ie lying about lumen outputs and runtimes) or try to rise above and take the high road and stay honest regardless of if that may mean lost sales.

Again, I've owned Surefires though none at the moment. And I own several Inova products and I've sold off more still... I don't mean this as a slight against Inova, but they have obviously decided to mislead about their lights output rather than take the route Surefire has of just staying honest. Same thing with Pelican recently... with their outrageous claims of runtimes. They probably aren't lying, but they aren't being entirely honest either. Doesn't make them a bad company, just a company that relies on gullable customers.

Different companies, different philosphies...

It's like buying a EQ/Power booster for your car stereo. Some claim 400 Watts from a tiny package which is absolutely impossible, but who's going to pay for a "watchdog" group to police car stereo and flashlight lumen ratings.

That's why it's nice that people do these kinds of tests (i.e. Flashlightreviews & ledmuseum).

I don't know if I completely agree with flashlightreview's numbers regarding the T4. I just got the T4 today, and just doing a ceiling bounce test in a dark room, and looking a various objects around the room, I'd say that it looks AT LEAST as bright as my Fenix L1P (output around the 17.00 value of the Longbow Mirca and the 19.00 value of the Nuwai Q3) and my Diamond 1-watt regulated bulb in my 3D m*g (output value 28.70).

So from what I can gather, maybe Inova isn't exaggerating their lumen figures THAT much. But I must agree, 100 lumens would be quite a stretch.

BTW, what kind of LED does the T4 have in there anyway?

I have a T-4 and it has a 4 watt Luxeon LED. It's bright, but what I like best is the color of the LED. It's very white (no hint of green or blue). The optics in my T-4 is very efficient and has decent throw (I usually carry a SL TL-3 xenon). The beam is smooth and has enough side-spill for slithering around the house during black-outs.

A 4 watt Luxeon, huh? Thing is, Luxeon doesn't make a 4 watt LED... Meaning it's either an under-driven Luxeon V or an over-driven Luxeon III which would be my guess.

Yet another marketing ploy...

I know this may be a totally seperate type of issue, but how is it that lightbulbs (of the same wattage) all produce the same amount of light? (I know Watt's and Lumen's are two totally diffrent things though) How is it that I can buy 5 different brands of 150 Watt bulb's and they all produce the same amount of light? I never had to play the lottery with lightbulbs that Ive done with flashlights.


Forgive me if my question is ignorant to many of you, but ive never taken an electronics class in highschool nor do I have a well rounded knowledge of the properties of light as many of you here seem to have.

But if I never ask, then i'll never know.

Skyclad01,

With light bulbs, there are no lens, optics, reflectors etc.
With flashlights, you have to take into account what LED is being used,
how hard it is being driven, what optic/reflector it has,
how clear the lens is. etc etc.

Also, I dont think all light bulbs of the same watt make the same lumens.
They are close, but not the same,
and especially not the same if you compare diff types of bulbs.

As for the 4W in the T4,
its an overdriven 3W led.
I know its not a 5Wer, theres no way it would run that long,
and its hard to focus a 5Wer into a tight beam.

~John

Well, I think it's probably a combnation of manufacturing process and marketing. I mean, when GE makes 100 watt bulb, they probably start off with a 1,000 ft run of filament then cut those filaments to EXACTLY the same length - that's the source of the light right there. With Luxeons... hell... there's variations between the exact same bin! I guess it's just a younger technology and those variations haven't been worked out yet.

Then there's the marketing side... EVERYONE needs light bulbs and EVERYONE buys lightbulbs. There's probably 2 or 3 percent of folks that buy the mini halogen or mini flourescent bulbs and 97 or 98 percent that buy the plain old cheapies so those manufacturers don't really need to lie about their ratings since they KNOW every one of them is going to sell. With flashlights, if you're looking at anything more expensive than a Mag, there's some question as to if it's going to be a hit or not.

And though I've never thought about it until now, probably the facilities that build light bulbs are ISO 9001 or 9002 certified so the facility has to document how they build and check and engineer (with 9001) and double check every stop probably including the ratings whereas I'm sure relative few flashlight companies are ISO certified.

When I turn on the vacuum which shares a circuit with a lamp the 100 W bulb gets significantly dimmer. So in fact the output from the 100 W bulb is not always the advertised number of lumens (assuming it ever was). In this case the reduced light output is the result of a voltage drop created by the vacuum. That would be equivalent to underdriving the LED. Putting your light on a dimmer switch is another way to underdrive the light and get less light than advertised.

Household light incandescent fixtures all operate at the same fixed voltage, whereas flashlights operate on batteries that decrease their voltage as they are drained. The different flashlights use different numbers or types of batteries and have different types of circuitry to feed the LEDs, which translates into different levels of light output even for the same LED. I think most of the variation between flashlights is explained by differences in the driving circuitry or batteries.

The other source of variation, the "luxeon lottery" has to do with solid state manufacturing processes which make it impossible to produce LEDs that have the same output. Instead you get a wide spread of outputs, you test them and group them into bins of similar performance. I would guess that this is because the output of an LED depends on microscopic changes in the LED. The output of an incandescent bulb depends on the filament being the same length and thickness--large scale gross properties that are much easier to control than whether something is a few nanonmeters thinner or thicker. So with LEDs (and also other solid state things like memory and CPUs) you do your best and you assess what you got at the end.

If the discussion is total output (lumens) then type of reflector shouldn't matter. And lens clarity surely shouldn't be a major issue. Certainly if you look at household lighting, there is a big variation in type of reflector and in lens clarity, bigger than in the flashlight world I'd reckon. (Want a flashlight with a Tiffany style lens? How about that attractive orange mica that looks like it only lets 10% of the light through?)

Skyclad01 said: "...Isnt that illeagle though? False advertising. Espically with them doubling the lumen rating?..."

It's not illegal. This situation arises anytime you measure performance of a mass market product, whether lumens or horsepower. It's worse for lumens since I don't think there's an SAE, ISO or other standard for measuring lumens.

E.g, a mfg could do a primitive ceiling bounce test with a $29 lux meter, compare to a "known" lumen light, and rightfully claim that output. There's no standards or enforcement body specifying you must measure lumens in a specific way to use the term "lumen".

Even if a mfg uses an integrating sphere, is it calibrated? How? Do they have a calibration record extending back to a known absolute standard?

Even if one flashlight was precisely measured, that doesn't mean the hundreds or thousands of like models will have the same output.

There's no rule saying a mfg must measure each light, or every tenth light. There's no rule saying a mfg must measure a final production light. They could measure a prototype which might vary from the final production model.

There's no rule saying a mfg must measure a light with typical consumer batteries, or even powered by batteries at all. They could direct wire DC power to it and overdrive the emitter.

This isn't just wild speculation, but similar things happen when rating automotive horsepower. This is despite the existence of an SAE net horsepower standard.

While the SAE net hp standard mandates certain items, it doesn't mandate gas octane, or whether the engine computer software is the final production version. Thus many mfgs were doing their SAE hp certification runs with one-off special engine control computers, premium gas (which allows advancing timing to produce more hp), and other tricks.

The new SAE "certified" hp standard finally put an end to that, and various mfgs had to release updated (often lower) hp numbers:

http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0508/17/A01-283759.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower

It's even worse for lumens since there is no measurement standard I'm aware of. Thus mfgs can claim a wide range of numbers and there's nothing illegal about it, it's just misleading.

The "80 lumens" and "4 watt Luxeon" were probably derived from the quoted specifications for the Luxeon 3 as stated by Lumileds.

Here's a Lux3 data sheet from Lumileds (PDF file):

http://www.lumileds.com/pdfs/DS45.PDF

If you look at table 2 on page 3, the "typical luminous flux" of a white Lux3 driven at 1000mA is 80 lumens.

If you look at table 9 on page 7, the "typical forward voltage" of a white Lux3 at 1000mA is 3.9 V. 1000mA x 3.9V = 3.9 watts, round up to 4 watts.

"Typical" means Lumileds allows for a variance of +/- 10% of luminous flux, and +/- 0.06V of Vf.

So a flashlight manufacturer is not being strictly misleading when a Lux3 flashlight is advertised as having a "4 watt Luxeon with 80 lumens output". After all, those claims are based upon specifications published by Lumileds. However, an individual emitter may underperform (or overperform) the "typical" specifications. The emitter may not be running under the specified conditions. Also, the theoretical maximum lumen output by the bare emitter is not the same as "out the front" lumens, because of losses from the optic/reflector, etc.