How low ? How often? How come?

My 458 Ham’r in moon mode makes 5.175 lumens. Seemingly bright for a moon mode but the thing has 17 emitters, 5 drivers… totally amazing the lowest output is so low!

<—— my Avatar is the Ham’r in moon mode.

I use the low on a zanflare f1 or blf a6 for my bedside light. It often stays on all night.

I’m 47 and i want at least 40-ish lumen from a light.
The lowest mode on the Astrolux A01 for example, is totally pointless for me.
It’s clear that others can navigate with much less light.
I haven’t actually tried what the minimum useful light output is for me, though.
When i need it, i grab a light and usually go for around 100 lumen or 1 Watt (i guesstimate), but this depends on the light too.

1 lumen +/-, anything less and these old eyes struggle. But for me only in familiar places like bedroom at night (daily) or inside tent, etc. When in an unfamiliar hotel or outside at campground, I need a little more so that I don’t trip or run into obstacles that might be at the peripheral to vision or a moonlight level beam.

And as some have indicated, it doesn’t disturb night vision adjustment and/or sleep pattern.


I have a Nitecore Tube attached to my lanyard which I fly with. It’s super lightweight so I don’t notice it behind my ID badge and RFID card.

You would be surprised how bright 1 lumen is after flying in complete darkness with minimal instrument lights on for hours at a time. I need to find a similar light that can go sub-lumen.

I rely on the pee light using a single amber LED as the light source, and it’s plenty bright.

Contrast sensitivity declines with age, and the ‘noise’ in the visual system increases. Dagnabbit.

Yeh, kinda like in a super quiet room with so little noise that you can hear your own heartbeat, sometimes you’ll hear “white noise” that seems to get intensely “loud”, probably just because your internal gain gets cranked up to 11.

Amazing just how noisy absolute silence can be…

So far looks like Polite P’ers is winning.

I am still what I would consider a polite p’er, it just takes me more light to see. And if I am up to john it probably cause my wife just went and woke me up.

Moonlight on my D4 looks to be 1-2 lumens, which is brighter than I’d like when I have to get up late at night to check on the kids, etc, but fine for non-adapted eyes for walking around a familiar area.

The 0.1 lumens on my Armytek Tiara is a pretty good level for indoors when my eyes are completely adjusted, but is definitely dim if my eyes are not adjusted.

I also like around 0.1 lumens as a nightlight when sleeping in an unfamiliar place.

That could be tinnitus.
Various ways to get that.
Clubbing for example.

Same goes for visual. Next time you’re on the bowl (quiet, well-lit, no motion anywhere), rest your head in your hands and keep your whole body as absolutely still as possible, and also focus your eyes on one fixed point (intersection of tiles, etc.), even forcing yourself to do so (your eyes will naturally “jitter” to prevent this effect).

What you’ll see is “white-out”, when the image you’re seeing will be so static that it’ll fade to white. The slightest bit of motion/jitter pulls back the actual image. Kinda like how a T. Rex mainly sees motion, but not static images.

Oh, I’ve had ringing in my ears from exposure to loud sounds, so I know what that sounds like, and can appreciate tinnitus (typically a constant high pitched tone or buzzing), but I’m pretty sure it’s not that.

Oh, and absolutely DO NOT BLINK when trying for white-out. ANY change in the image, even a few “pixels” in any direction, pulls back the static image. You need to make the image as still and unchanging as possible, at least 10sec or more.

I think i have tinnitus, and it’s just noise, full frequency spectrum, but louder in the higher regions.
I used to be a sound guy for DJ’s and also bartender (and technician) in the legendary Blauwe Aanslag basement.
Smoking ‘herbs’, drinking and everything else may have made it worse too… The roaring 20s… :person_facepalming:
Still, my hearing is quite good.
But the background noise is always there…
I’m used to it though.

But back to vision, i may have done some damage with big black light lamps (in that same basement)…
We used to hire a couple of big fat ones for the Goa parties.
Great for the fluo decorations they brought, and everyone (everything) looked weird, of course…
Or maybe it was the stroboscopes for the Tekno parties…

I’m gonna try it some time, what is the minimum but still useful to me.

Can relate to this. :person_facepalming:

My Reylight Pineapple Mini lives on my nightstand.

The Mini is my go to at night and in the morning when I don’t want to disturb my wife and I rarely use more than the .1 lemon moonlight mode (on AAA) when getting dressed for work, etc.

I have many other lights around, but the Mini is used a ton. Was surprised the output is that low, could have guessed it was like 1-3 vs. 0.1

I was playing around with my SC52w, trying to get the locator beacon to function (it’s the older version, prior to the programming change), and gave up. But I must have accidentally changed the L1 to the lowest mode (there are 3 settings). The lowest is so incredibly low… must be that half lumen you speak of. I thought my battery was getting low… but the 4 clicks gave back 2 flashes (1 is lowest charge level). It’s pretty amazing. The only thing I can get to go lower is my old NovaTac 120P.

This thread speaks to me. I’m always on the search for sub-lumen lights. To this end, I have 3 Thrunites on the way. Supposedly the Ti3 goes down to 0.04 lumens but I’ve seen that low lumen ratings (from all brands) are usually inaccurate. My lowest low is probably my Photon Freedom Micros, which can appear even lower for the colored LEDs. Another thing about low modes is they usually have PWM. It’s hard to find a manufacturer that does sub-lumen modes without PWM.

But I don’t usually use the low modes to light things up, though. Like mentioned in the first post, I use them to locate the light, like a glow in the dark that doesn’t need to be charged or a brighter tritium.

I used to use my D4 while walking around the house in the dark, but I always seem to hold the button a little too long when turning on moonlight mode and it goes brighter than I need. Since my Thrunite V6 arrived, I use that on firefly mode and I’m liking it a lot. I think it’s .5 lumen. I get up a least once a night to check on my son, or go to the bathroom. I don’t want to wake my wife or my son so I use the least amount of light as possible. I find that .5 lumens is plenty of light for me. I think most of us are middle of the night P’ers. lol

Used to use sub lumen a lot . As my eyes got older , I went up and up . I now use the MR70 defused side light at its lowest level. ( they rate it at 3 lumens ) . That seems to be working best for me during my nightly trips .

Moonlight is one of my most used modes though in my D4 it’s still too bright for me. Classic don’t-wake-girlfriend light, looking for stuff in my wallet or read texts/signs.

Using Astrolux S1 daily, Moonlight, Low and Medium 1 are my most used modes. Even the TN40S I just received has a Moonlight mode, just a very throwy one :smiley: