The last two weekends I and my brother decided to do a full battery of tests on our flashlights. We did full lumen testing in my lightbox, tested lux at one meter, and then did real life throw tests starting at 50m going up to 700m. This last part was done in a very desolate state park road with almost no ambient light. It was long and straight with a good tree canopy to help keep ambient light minimized. I had my meter and meter sensor mounted to a clipboard and had reflector tape boxing the sensor to give a target to shoot at. We had distances measured and marked out with a 100meter tape measure the during the day. The lights were kept at the 0 meter point and I then walked to each test point and let my brother start shooting away at the reflector surrounded sensor. We then recorded the highest observed reading after about 5 seconds. It’s not a 100% perfectly scientific method, but it did the job nicely. My sensor only reads in the tenths down low, so we just generally use .2 as “making” the distance and throw. A few others we tested down to .1 for curiosity sakes.
We have a pretty good range of highend lights and budget lights. All batteries that could be charged up were topped off. All the primaries were at least good healthy ones.
During our night throwing test we thought were finished before we started. Park Rangers pulled up right when we were starting. But fortunately the guys were cool and just wanted to know what we were doing. One even picked up my SR90 to try out. He was certainly impressed with it. They left after a couple minutes and told us to have fun. And that we did. The SR90 really had no rivals on our test, though the 7G5 and M3C4 did very respectable.
Here are the lights getting ready to be tested -
This may get quicky buried, but we really use this kind of thing. It will be used and referenced a lot. Highly appreciate the time and effort involved!
.2 looking at the light is very noticeable. It was also enough for me to at least see the road below me versus the grass on the sides. I could see enough to stay on the road & enough I had to squint when the clipboard & sensor wasn’t shielding my eyes. It was dark enough out there I truly couldn’t see anything 10ft in front of me without my some type of light. I used a simple headlamp for walking the distances out and then switched it to a low red led to see the meter readings and record everything when testing.
We had lots of fun doing it. Only issue was that thanks to the tree canopy I walked into spider webs a few times - that freaked me out! - there is some pretty big spiders in that forest. And we used a good set of two-way radios to cummunicate with beyond the 100m mark.
We intend to do some beam shots with the same lights in the next weekend to two. We’re just trying to decide the best distance/distances to shoot them from and exactly what to shoot at.
And thanks for the compliments guys. We actually have a lot of fun doing these tests.
The calibration I think is actually pretty close. On the lights that are actually ANSI rated I tested about 1/2 slightly higher and about 1/2 slightly lower. That’s at the 30sec point of course. Some of the little lights were tested(and indicated) using IMR’s, and those were high readings as expected. And some of the lights that read high are well known to be under estimated by the factory - like the D25C clicky. The budget lights are all over the place, again as expected, But the rest look pretty accurate to me.
But I admit my testing has its limitation. We did at least make sure to test everything back to back without even turning the meter off for the most consistent testing we could do. I guess the best thing about our tests is that it provides a very good comparison between different lights due to very consistent testing.
nicely done man great job! i didnt know there was two version of the skyray king? where did you get the more powerful u2 version? i wonder what mine is now??
Looks like the winner to me in/among the under $25 club.
The U2 ’s do seem to pull their weight in general, that is what I will be concentrating on in future purchases.
Thanks for the great chart, printed it for reference.
Now you will make me spend more $
