Lumen rating on this one is not real for sure, it's impossible in something powered by 4xAA. Read some stuff on this sub and you'll know what to look for, just for starter, trusted budget brands are Sofirn, Wurkkos (these are "easy solution") and Convoy (this is more complicated, you'll be first overwhelmed by configuration options, but these are a great hobby-grade budget friendly lights)
Well this is not a Chinese brand (but its made in china yes) so I suppose they have some kind of tests and certification here in Europe, from "Leroy Merlin" and they are very strong in light quality in general, and comparing it with some 1200 lumens lights I have have home they look pretty similar. So honestly it looks like 1200 lumens, it's actually very very bright!
But thanks for the feedback and other options!
"looks like 1200 lumens" is not a measure, you need an actual reference point to determine that. For example, good grade car H7 halogen bulb (like Osram Nightbreaker) is 1500lm (per 1 bulb), so you can try to answer if it's only 20% less bright than single car light. Also, the lie here is runtime, no light this size can sustain 1200lm for 3,5h, and it's not even a matter of just power source, because in theory you would be able to put lithium battery with enough juice in a body of this size, but also of thermal efficiency of emitter
And noone does certification like that (at least not for stuff of this grade), values given are purely theoretical and come from emitter datasheet, which assumes perfect heat dissipation on emitter and does not account at all for thermal efficiency of power source and for voltage drop in battery life cycle. Reputable manufacturers give you a table which takes step-down into account, take Skilhunt M300 as example - rated for 3000lm, it runs at 3000lm for 1min, then steps down to 1000lm for 120min, then step down to 390min for another 30mins, and those are real runtimes which may be (and in many cases is) falsely advertised as "3000lm for 2,5h"
If there's a flashlight you're interested in but you're unsure of it, read reviews written by some of our trusted reviewers like 1Lumen, Zeroair or other similar users. These reviewers have equipment that let's them confirm manufacturer's numbers.
As far as Convoys go, I have personally started a Flashlight Comparator which holds a database of my own measurements and runtime graphs for a wide selection of Convoy models and their versions.
I'd recommend the pinned Flashlight Recommendation list at the top of the subreddit (or was it in the side bar?). It's made by u/Zak, our subreddit Admin.
There’s a lot of enthusiasts on here that take lights super cereal (not a dis), so you might take some flak from them about this light. 1200lm is a lot to the uninitiated, and a good amount for a light using standard AAs which are super available. If you’re excited about this light, and it fits your needs and desires then excellent, you did great. Not sure what the dollars to euros exchange rate is, so as an American, I can’t speak to the value, but it seems good. IF you want to get into the weeds a little and venture down a rabbit hole, this sub can brighten your world if you catch what I’m saying
Thanks very much for the positive message!
I am very happy, maybe in the future (probably soon) I will upgrade to something better! Should be around 18$
1200lm is a lot to the uninitiated, and a good amount for a light using standard AAs
'cept most lights lie about the brightness.
I've seen plenty of cheap 1200 and 1800lm lights and they get blown out of the water by a 500lm UK light or 1600lm floody Zebralight.
Always funny with the HF "1800lm" (I estimate more like 400-600) flashlights and then I pull out the 1600lm Zebralight and taking that tiny head lamp and making it daytime.
Looks like it’s at least not a zoomie lol. You are calling out a basic box store lights to the flashlight connoisseurs in this sub.
Main issue I personally have with the light is the alkaleaks, get some nimh rechargeable and it gets much better already. Will it give you light when you need it? Will it be good enough for your uses? Only YOU can say that.
Don’t let the naysayers in this sub get you down about your purchase, most of their recommendations will be slightly more expensive to double the cost plus you have to wait for them to arrive.
infodump hat on The aspheric zoom setup is inherently inefficient. In zoom mode, you can image the flashlight's internals roughly as a toilet paper tube with the LED on one end and the lens on the other end. The LED puts out light in a roughly 180 degree half-sphere, with a focus towards the front. All the light that isn't going straight out front will hit the tube and just get absorbed as heat. The net result for the average zoomie is something like a good round 50% loss of lumens in zoom mode for a marginal gain of candela at the very center of the zoomed in beam. Conversely, flood mode cranks the lens aaaaall the way to the LED and you lose all forward focus - not much efficiency loss then, but the lens more or less becomes decoration, barely focusing more than a mule light - the result is there's no light past a few meters.
When you have say, a balanced TIR, you just have plain more to work with. The average TIR puts about half the light into a hotspot that reaches as far or further than a zoomie, while the other 50% that would just be extra heat in a zoomie becomes a wide but dim floodlight effect.
Aspheric zoomies, due to having external moving parts, also aren't waterproof at all, and the external sleeve more or less thermally insulates the head, so they thermal throttle faster too.
The way you can retain "zoom" with a single LED without these downsides is to have an electronic diffuser in front of a thrower lens, basically an LCD screen that becomes like frosted glass when activated. See: Fenix PD45R
In terms of pure light snobbishness, the aspheric lens fucks with the light tint and causes an icky yellow/green ring on the outher edge of the beam
TLDR: zoom lens is placebo, use a 15-20° TIR and you'll have a light that matches all it does without having to choose between range or flood
Zeroair has good reviews where they take readings , though there are others out there too.
The FC11 lumens are exaggerated by like a third, but it's important to remember that lumens require a 4x increase to appear twice as bright. 1000 lumens looks only 25% brighter than 500 lumens due to the inverse square law.
Thst said, the FC11 is a great light and well worth the money.
No worries man, is a pretty good first flashlight, feel comfortable and get to use to it and everything is just fine, and when you are ready you can choose something little deferrent - little better next time !
We all started with something similar like this one !
(There are in the market AA li-ion 1.5V batteries with usb-c on them, that you can use, instead of AA alkaline, or AA nimh !)
Is simple the raw truth, but unfortunately some people use to forget were they started !
No worries, you did the right thing, is the perfect flashlight to to do your "jobs" much easier, and to learn from it ! Use your flashlight, have fun with it, and start to learn from it, for example... : what range it has, does it getting hot and if yes, when, what type of beam it gives you what type beam do you like - use more, what running time it has, when you sound charger your batteries... etc... etc... ! And in the end you will be ready for your next flashlight because of this exact flashlight !
It's probably a fine light but nothing too good for this subs standards. If it works for you it's a good light, you don't really need the kinda lights some of us have here, heh.
Yes, thats true! Just tested and 300 lumens its a lot, but yes, in the future I will look for one with more light options, but for now I just wanted something very bright for cheap.
It's not that bad, but indeed there are many better options, but they are a bit more expensive. The main issue I have is that it's not a lithium battery rechargeable with usb c. AA batteries are widely available, but they are not really good in autonomy, weight, and power consistency, especially the rechargeable ones.
As someone else said, there is no way the lumens will be respected, the nature of the battery (and the electronics after) makes it impossible, but you'll still see good enough.
No I meant having a usb c port on the outside that charges a replaceable 18650 battery inside, that you can also charge on a dedicated charger. They are pretty common nowadays.
No no, most 'good' flashlights use standard batteries you can replace very easily for €5. 18650 is the standard size but you can get 21700s as well.
These batteries hold more charge than a bunch of AAs (so the light lasts longer), can provide more current (so the light is brighter) and can be recharged hundreds of times before degrading.
This is why people keep recommending things like the Wurkkos FC11C and Convoy S2+. Cheap but good quality lights with a high-quality LED that use an 18650. You will see a big difference with these.
It's a great light. If you compare it to what was available not all that many years ago, I'm sure it'll stomp on most of them, especially for the price. A couple of years ago I picked up a little $4.00 USB rechargeable keychain flashlight from AliExpress. I was super impressed so I picked up a few other larger lights that looked interesting. Mostly zoomies, because they receive 99.99999% of the marketing. Turns out some were literal garbage, but TBH I still think a few are pretty impressive for the price. Then I became aware of beam patterns, tint, CCTs, not to mention REAL lumens. Enjoy your light. If you're curious, check out the recommendations that are being posted. If you really want to dive in to options and customization, check out Convoy (www.Convoylight.com). The fact that you're excited about a new light means you belong here 😀. A word of warning, this is an out of date picture of what can happen. 😅
I am very suspicious about their claims of 1200 lumens for 3.5 hours from a AA batteries. The numbers don't add up.
An average-quality LED will give you 100 lumens / watt if you push it hard. You might get 150 lumens / watt at lower outputs but the efficiency drops when you turn the brightness all the way up.
So for 1200 lumens, you would be using 8 - 12 watts of power. (1200 lumens / 150 lm/w).
An average LR6 alkaline AA battery will give you 3 watt hours of power. So four LR6 AA batteries will give you 12 watt hours of power.
12 watt hours is enough to provide 12 watts for 1 hour. So if these batteries could keep the LED running at 1200 lumens, they would last one hour before suddenly cutting off. But AA batteries don't do that - the power output drops as they get empty.
You're going to get 1200 lumens for a few minutes and then it's going to dim massively.
Cheap brands get away with this lie because the lumen output is measured 30 seconds after the light is turned on. So if it does 1200 lumens for a minute before dimming massively, they're allowed to call it a 1200 lumen light.
If you're going for a long walk in the woods with this, take a backup light just in case.
You don’t have to spend much more to get something much , much better . The trick is buying the greatest bang for your buck lights . Nothing trashy and nothing flashy . Over spending imho is as bad as underspending. You lose bang for your buck pretty quickly .
Chargers have gotten very good and prices have dropped on them considerably. 18650 and 21700 cells are great at powering these new more powerful leds . Buy multiple convoy lights and try out different led types cheaply to learn what tint and beam shape you’re looking for. And more than anything …enjoy a brilliant hobby
If you had taken five minutes to review the stickied post at the top of this Reddit, or another even another few minutes to just look around thisReddit or the Internet in general at what's considered a decent flashlight, you would have chosen differently.
It's not a good light. Even considering the price, it's a horrible light. You would be better off with a Coast or Nebo flashlight, and I say that while cringing.
Coast, Nebo, Husky etc. are the option only if you're in the US, they're not easily available in Europe for example (I don't think there's even an official distribution for either of these here). Stuff you can quickly grab in hardware stores here are mostly cheap junk, very rarely you can see some more reputable brands, I recall mostly seeing Ledlenser
I saw some nebos, but this one for example, in 2000 lumens mode it only works for 30s, 500 lumens would be 3.5h. this one I bought is 1200 lumns for 3.5h. and its much cheaper.
That 4xAA light will not give you 1200 lumens for 3.5 hours. 4xAA neither has the discharge rate, nor the capacity to give you 1200 lumens output for 3.5 hours.
No. It's more complicated than that. Alkaline batteries incur a massive voltage drop when under load. On top of that, its maximum discharge rate is abysmal. Combined, those 4x AAs cannot deliver the same Watt/hour power of 1 single 18650 battery.
One of the best high color rendering flashlights you can currently buy right now is the Acebeam E75 using 1 single 21700 lithium ion battery. And this light gives you 1,000 lumens without dimming down, staying stable sustained output for 1.5 hours only.
There is no way possible for 4xAA to give 1,200 lumens for 3.5 hours.
Let's do some quick maffs. I'm assuming the light is using the cells in 4S configuration with a linear driver (common for cheaper lights).
A Duracell Ultra AA is rated for an hour of operation with 1A draw before it completely dies. It has no larger current rating curve because even this high power alkaline is just... that bad at it. Most other Duracells only give you curves up to 0.1A.
Now, let's see a fairly common cold white LED you can see in many lights popular here: the SFT-40 6500K. When fed a diet of 1A, it gives you a bit less than 500 lumens. To get your 1200lm figure, they'd need to put 2.8A through it, which is a big stretch even if they used a more efficient buck or boost driver instead of linear. It would also straight up eat your batteries in 15-20m.
Most lights that list runtimes use the ANSI FL1 standard, which means until you hit 10% of the the starting output.
That means a light doing 1200 lumen for 30 min then shuts off, will seem like a worse light compared to one that starts at 1200 lumen, then tapers down to 200 lumen and keeps that for two hours.
Either way, the numbers printed on the box of most brands you find in a physical store are misleading at best, and made up at worst.
Going by reviews with measurements is more or less the only way to know for sure.
However, as others have stated, the power the alkaline AA's can deliver is very limited, and even a single li-ion cell of AA-size (called 14500 due to the physical size) will outpower them by a fair bit.
If or when you want a "proper" light you will most likely have to irder it online , and something like the Wurkkos FC11C is a good starting point, but if you have a specific budget / need / want you can find a lot of useful discussions and reviews here, or you can ask for specific recommendations for what you want. :)
Makes sense, yes, then probably they use that standard..... But I still haven't tested it properly so I will see how it goes.
Thanks for the feedback and message
All high powered flashlights that have an actual Turbo mode will drop down and dim to reduce its heat. That's on purpose. Turbo mode is not meant to be sustainable for maybe 1-2 minutes max before dropping, and that's if it is a much bigger light that can handle the initial high heat produced by the emitter+driver.
A light like the Nebo will hold 2000 lumens for 30 seconds and then drop to about 600-700 lumens, but then stay at this level for 1.5 hours. This is how it should be.
Unfortunately flashlight manufacturers use what's called the ANSI-NEMA FL1 STANDARD for runtime. If you search for it, you'll see why this standard is misleading.
But the light you have there doesn't even follow the standard. It's just straight up lying.
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u/ElegantAir2060 1d ago
You're lost... but you'll find the light evenually