Unpopular Flashlight Opinion Thread

For the sake of bumping a fun thread…

#17: Long power outages suck. It’s nice to exercise your lights and all, but the amusement only lasts until the fridge warms over (or to a lesser extent, a cold front rolls in and your house has an electric shower).

I’ve never liked power outages and while my collection makes them a little more bearable, I still don’t like dealing with them…. I’ve got a basement, and it gets dark everyday, after all.

+1 . I agree, many times it is. The ‘latest’ is not always the greatest.
At times, the old ‘tried & true’ remains superior. :+1:

I like this one, a lot. :innocent:

Throw is largely useless except when building something that uses a 20,000lm COB.

I don’t really use my Fenix TK35 anymore since the beam is so tight that it is just painful up close. A wide even beam is easier on your eyes and immensely more useful.

I'm not a fan of NarsilM, Andruil or any fancy firmware. I prefer simple and non-programmable. I really hate that every flashlight I own has a different manual of arms.

AGREED!

Just came back from building checks. Walking with a VG10 and I notice that as I move, the hotspot 20-30 feet out is distracting me because it’s moving around so fast. No hot spots for me on an EDC.

I’m still waiting for my holy grail of a $20, 21700 2000 lumen floody, pockatable EDC.

What’s the diameter of the VG10’s reflector?

Might be able to shoehorn in a 26mm TIR with, say, a 60° spread.

Just because something has options doesn’t mean you need to use them.

I don't understand that sentence. It's unavoidable, sometimes inadvertently.

Fair enough, and Narsil/Anduril would be the biggest offenders.

With something like DrJones, GuppyDrv, Bistro/Biscotti or PFlexPro advanced you’d be hard pressed (pun intended) to accidentally get into the settings mode though in my experience.

I’d rather have the options than not. Making them hard to accidentally access should be the solution IMO, not completely removing them.

As someone who mains Biscotti, I agree completely.

Well put. Just like keeping strobe out of the sequential brightness mode path, advanced modes should require a very deliberate command to access.

I think that any feature should be hard to access accidentally. But easy to access when you need to. So UI designer has to weigh these 2 opposites.
Configuration tends to be one-in-a-lifetime to few-times-in-a-lifetime used option. So weighing towards hard access seems right.
Most UIs that require multiple button presses for anything assign the maximum number of clicks for configuration.

USB rechargeable flashlight should be mandatory in 2019…
What century is this really ?
Smartphone, laptop, GPS, MP3 player… except for DSLR, what battery-powered gadget is not USB rechargeable today ?

Until there’s a viable solution to the lack of integrity (drop and water resistance, neither of which smartphones, laptops and other such doodads normally have to deal with) inherent to a USB port, I’m perfectly happy with purely off-board recharging.

USB rechargeable batteries are a good start.

There are phones where the USB port is resistant to submersion. It doesn’t need a flap protection…and it somehow works.
I don’t know why no flashlight manufacturers do it this way….I suppose they may lack know-how or that it costs more - but the first can be fixed and the seconds can’t be a show-stopper for higher-end lights.
So maybe there are other reasons?…

“Unpopular” opinions I agree with…

(built-in charging is nice on multi-cell lights, but I’d still rather not dedicate space for that in a compact EDC light)

I like both, but definitely prefer a tail switch on my EDC light.

Both are fun, but the middle is the most useful.

… and that’s probably enough opinion-quoting for one post. If I keep going, I’ll end up quoting the whole thread.

Have you tried a Convoy S7? It’s on the right here:

I like PWM, it makes movement look like I’m in a high frame rate action video.

:slight_smile:
I don’t have much use for the middle. I tend to use flooders for a close up and throwers for walking and looking far. For middle distances…I rarely need to look at middle distances where a modest thrower (like GT Mini) is too throwy yet a flooder can’t light them well. The middle distance is very very narrow anyway, depending on the light combo I have on me. Often it doesn’t exist at all.
Actually when I think about it…I think I’m yet to prefer a middle beam for any use…though I have one where I haven’t tried a middle beam yet and I suspect it will be just right.

Potting the internals should make them fairly waterproof, which I recently did on the Convoy S9