No, better not. These are not toys. A 500 lm XM-L with a 20mm head diameter is safe though, with protected batts….won’t get too scalding hot also. If you get an AA NiMH XM-L, best. About 200-300 lm.
I nearly got blinded with a HID and 55W bulb, with 75W ballast so that one was overclocked. Actually for that one wasn’t even the hotspot issue, but even the spill is sufficient to screw up your vision for a good couple of hours. The light accidentally fell on its side and my eyes directly caught the spill just some 15-30 cm away. I had a bright spot vision right in the middle of my field of vision for a few hours. Forget about the blink reflex or look away reflex, they don’t help enough.
The 55W bulb just has an arc gap of 3mm and you are doing like 5000 - 6000 lumens easy. Go calculate the surface luminosity.
eg relative to a XHP 35 is 3.5mm x 3.5mm. How many lumens is that, should you even catch the side-spill up close?
Not sure how many lux is the side spill that close though, havent measured that. Don’t get mixed up lux with surface luminosity though, i sometimes mix them up.
I also have a couple of lasers small to big weak to powerful, those are even worse as the laser lights are literally infinitely point source wrt LEDs. 5mW in certain scenarios can cause eye damage. Their low divergence means their beams stay dangerous, so forget about being 10m away from the laser, coz even the reflections might be dangerous.
That point source light would be focused onto the retina, and these point sources burn your retina the same way as a magnifying glass + sun combo.
With a real intense LED high cd hotspot, you’d get an even bigger hole in the retina wrt your eyes catching the spill, if both are pretty up-close.
One thing that also needs to be mentioned, is that laser light is coherent light. It loses very little energy or get “out of focus” (lack of a better word) after passing through the lens, a lot of energy is left to be focused on the retina. LED “non-coherent” white light behaves a bit more differently. But still get enough white light brute force candelas onto the pupils, bad things would happen still no matter how it’s badly focused onto the retina and energy transmission to the tissue cells.
Oh btw, if anyone wants to know a number, once i had some free time and tried to measure my cheapest and lowest powered 50mW greenie from several tens of metres away, typical aperture size (no beam expander) and no real effort done to focus it accurately at that distance also. It’s works out to be 8 Million cp on the lux meter, seriously not very high. I’m not sure how the green light is being accurately measured by the lux meter, but well it’s just a number. If it so happens that you focused it to be around 1m (for burning purposes) and it feel from the tripod and with sheer luck the beam gets through your pupils, it’s well well above that 8 M cp. Up close, that “8 M cp” is still from an infinite point source of light that the eye lens can focus more or less nicely onto the retina, unlike a big reflector HID or BLF GT hotspot, even if we keep the lux readings on the pupil diameter to be the same for both LED and laser light sources. It’s this point source that significantly makes laser light so much more dangerous even with the same lux, coz of the way it’s focused on the retina to be a point source image.
PS. It’s actually the thermal and photochemical effects that the laser light has on retina tissues. Another issue is that green causes more damage to the retina (red) than red laser light, something like green lasers can pop red balloons and it’d take much higher powered red lasers to pop that same balloon.