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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I would hazard a guess that actual runtimes vs advertised runtimes are also something that can vary greatly as well? I am pretty new to a lot of this so I am trying to learn all I can.