Moonlight Mode Champions?

In each of my kids room i ceiling bounce a sc62w for their night light and it runs continuously. I swap the 18650s out every 2-3 months ish, i loose track. +1 zebralight.

Skilhunt M150 has the specs:
14500 battery - 0.2 lumens - 50 days
Ni-MH battery - 0.2 lumens - 55 days

Didn’t have the time to test it for that whole time, but if it corresponds to the truth, it is a long runtime to be considered !!!

I don’t know that it’s winning any awards, but my favorite and most used moonlight mode light for the past coupla years is the Reylight Pineapple Mini.

Officially rated at 0.1 lumen for 50hrs on AAA. Always end up grabbing the cell and topping it off with my other Eneloops every few months before it ever actually dies.

I doubt anything can stand up against QTC lights in such benchmark. Not in advertisments but in real life.

Zebralights…I’ve read somewhere here of someone having their ZL on for a year.

Reylight mini Pineapple has a pretty sweet moonlight mode

Pretty expensive nightlight. :smiley:

Reylight Pineapple, Zebralight and a build with the H17F driver.

Zebralight used to be the king of moonlight mode with their 0.01lm lowest low mode.

Now they’ve raised it to 0.07lm because they think nobody needs 0.01lumens (wrong). The difference between the two is big.

The current moonligh mode champion will be a 2000K Nichia E21A modded Wizard Pro with a firefly of 0,02 lumens. That combined with a much more difused optic means it will beat the crap out of a Mk IV Zebralight when it comes to super low modes.

When did they make this change? I have an SC64 LE and I’m now wondering what the lowest low on mine really is… :weary:

Is your goal longest runtime or lowest output?

The RRT-01 goes extremely low, but my understanding is the driver overhead uses far more power than the LED at those levels. As a result, it’s great for people who demand minimal lighting, but not for ultra-long runtime.

You’ve got more than one? And use ’em for that? If you ever feel like parting ways with one, let me know :wink:

I recall discussion of the old Arc AAAs, which drop to moonlight when the battery’s near exhausted. Maker Gransee recommended that if anyone really needed the light to leave it on continuously rather than turning it off and back on later thinking to save the battery — because powering up the driver sucked so much power compared to just keeping the LED glowing.

yes but that moonlight is not an actual mode, its just the result of an exhausted battery. On a full battery, the Arc has no moonlight mode

I would rather get a light that produces a moonlight mode consistently, with a full battery too :wink:

Here’s the reddit post about the SC62w runtime test that was mentioned by several folks.

It passed one year a few days ago! It’s running an LG cell measured at 3425 mAh.

My SC62w has been in my pocket for 4 years now. The 0.01 lumen mode is indeed usable in some cases.

For fun, I just took these photos of three ZebraLights on their lowest modes.

From left to right is the SC62w, SC64c LE, and SC64c with a Nichia 219B sw45k swap.


The 219B is clearly the dimmest, followed by the SC62w at 0.01 lumens, then the SC64c LE at 0.05 lumens.

I am looking at long runtime with a usable amount of light. My Armytek Tiara sits at .4 lumen for an advertised 60 days. The Elf C2 advertises .4 lumen for 200 days. Nice.

I suppose, if in darkness long enough, .1 lumens could seem pretty bright. I guess the litmus test for me is the amount of light I would need to be able to read or navigate in the dark.

I would take any “measurements” of moonlight mode brightness with a grain of salt. It can vary a lot from one instance of a light to another.

Yes, most of the MkIV models have around a 0.07 lumen minimum. That’s been around for the past couple of years. Before that, they used to do 0.01 lumens.

Of my 4 most recent Zebralights (all MkIV versions), the SC600w HI, SC600w Plus, and SC64w HI, all have the 0.07 lumen minimum. My H600Fc has a lower minimum moonlight. It’s not quite as low as the old 0.01 outputs, but it’s nice to see they haven’t completely given up on the really low modes.

IMO, the 0.01 outputs are just too low to be useful. Perhaps usable to some, but not me. Great for run-time contests, though!

Heres a comparison of an SC64 LE (left) vs H600c MkIV (right)

“0.05lm” vs “0.08lm” respectively; this shows that it’s hard to get solid numbers with output this low.