Broad Daylight Beamshots: Monster lights vs. the Sun

LED Flashlights – General Info
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I recall a post somewhere about beamshots on a wall in broad daylight. So, I decided to take a few of my bigger lights outside and challenge the Sun. I knew it was a losing battle, but it's fun. As I write this, it's getting cloudy out... oops.

Anyway, here are the contenders:

From left to right:

  • TangsFire HD2010 with XM-L2 T6 driven at 4.5A+
  • SkyRay King with 3x XM-L2 U2 driven at 2.8A/emitter
  • BTU Shocker with 3x XM-L2 U2 driven at 4.5A (DRY driver)
  • LusteFire 3XU2-X3 with 3x MT-G2 driven at 2.8A/emitter

All emitters on copper.

First, the control. This is direct afternoon sunshine on a grey brick wall. All shots appear to be at the same exposure, f/2.4 1/4347s ISO107 (Cell phone shots). Lights are about two feet from the wall.

First up, HD2010 with its nice sharp hotspot:

Next we have the SRK, not bad for a flooder:

Here is the BTU Shocker. Note the visible PWM even on Turbo:

And finally, the LusteFire, with more lumens, but it spreads them around:

That's all for now. Needless to say, the sun wins by a hefty margin. It lights up a rather large area quite well from ~92 million miles. Anyone care to calculate that throw in candelas? Not bad for a mule :D

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you cant compare to the sun, it uses trustfire batteries (in runaway)

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Nice to see the sun is still doing so well .

I believe the post with the broad daylight beamshot was from manny, with his Electrolumens Search&Rescue SST-90 light (edit:found it, actually a highly enjoyable video ).

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direct-to-copper XM-L vesus daylight here.

Sol’s got the surface brightness part of the equation on lock.

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The tint on the Lustefire looks great.

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Is the PWM not visible when you take photos of the beam in the dark?

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Doesn’t it though? Those MT-G2s have a very nice tint. I will be trying for nightime beamshots tonight.

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I believe the sun is really 3 x MTG-2’s direct to copper wired in series with a flux capacitor to control pwm and a Brocky (Aussie legendary car racer) polariser to cut the harmful beams powered by King Kong’s on a generator bike.
Love the comparison by the way.

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Thanks MrsDNF.
Chi-X, I was thinking about the tint on the LusteFire more. Because it is right around 5000K, and the midday Sun is around 5200K, it blends in quite well. I have a feeling this is part of why that hotspot appears underwhelming. The others have enough colour contrast to stand out more.
Chloe, we’ll hopefully find out tonight if the PWM shows up. I suspect it will not show up because of the slower shutter speed.