Stop with the BS flashlights with low sustained output.

That looks like another expencive hobby.

If weight isnt a consern you can use a light with bigger mass. I dont know how hot the blf gt70 gets but my normal gt stays cold on turbo.

wow. knowing how hard this is this dude is unbelievable, especially at night and such a long run

You can get what you want, but you’ll carry a 10 pound light in one hand and a briefcase-sized battery unit in another.

I don’t understand the need for max power with unlimited run time - unless “unlimited” means for the duration of the battery charge, which won’t be a lot running on max. Just like high performance sports cars. A Porsche GT2 RS does 670BHP at 7000rpm. But no one (except Indy500 and F1 racers) run their engines up at the redline constantly - you’ll kill your engine. Plus it’s not necessarily the most efficient way to drive the car. We start and stop, speed up and slow down, and for me, my flashlight use is just that. Crank it up when I need to, then drop it down to a sufficient level. Same thing when I drive - I only crank up the high bean when necessary, and it’s almost never necessary to keep them on all the time.

For max power with long run times, a portable scene light would be great, but they’re not necessarily convenient for handheld use for long periods.

Just give me direct access to the highest sustainable level, rather than making me wait for turbo to step down to get to the level that’s sustainable for an hour.

This just makes sense to me, but most UIs don’t allow for it.

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Regarding turbo mode:
A small pocket light like the Emisar D4 might run sustained around 500 lumens, but can turbo for 4300 lumens.

Sure I could just get a light that can sustain its max output of 500 lumens. But in my opinion, that would be considerably less useful than also having available a turbo mode.

The D4 can already run at 500 lumens for an extended period so I wouldn’t really be gaining anything by buying a light whose peak output is a sustained 500 lumens. All that would happen is I would lose the very useful added functionality of being able to burst extremely high lumens for brief periods.

Regarding active cooling:
I admit, I would like to have active cooling in my lights to provide higher sustained output. A small fan would be pretty nice. The problems:

  • Pocket-sized EDC lights simply don’t have room for a fan
  • A poorly executed fan system probably wouldn’t offer any benefit over a well executed passive heat removal system (like on Zebralights).
  • PC Fans aren’t waterproof. Would a light with a built-in fan have zero waterproofing? … not even against rain drops? I’m not sure how useful that would be.
  • Water resistant fans are probably available, but I expect they would be more expensive and harder to find. I haven’t looked.

This is one reason I like Anduril UI over the default UI in the Emisar D4.

In the D4, double-click takes you to turbo which then rapidly ramps down. With Anduril, you can set double-click to any level you want. So the highest sustained level or maybe the highest level that won’t burn your pocket. You can still get to turbo with a double-click when the light is on.

Still hoping to get Anduril onto my D4 lights. Hopefully this week if I can get the software and hardware to work.

It’s good to know that Anduril allows that.

You know, in high school, I learned that in weight training, there was such a thing as “reps” and such a thing as “maxing out” and that those were two totally different things. Why is it hard for people to understand that “unsustainable” Turbo mode is useful and desired by many, while there are usually PLENTY of lower modes you can use if you want a “sustained” output level? Just turn the light down to a lower level! How hard is that?! :person_facepalming:

Did you read this thread?

If you explain it using “Cars” I will understand better.

:smiley: CARS DavidEF

I built a Convoy C8 with an XHP 70.2, DD driver, and running two 18350 batteries. I would say that of the 5 brightness levels, I use mostly 1 and 2. I rarely use 5 because it’s actually too bright for near-range sight, but it does illuminate a wide view like daylight, and I don’t need to lug a 4 pound light with me. Of course it will get hot fast, but not long enough before I drop the brightness down. I probably could have just dumbed down the output or used a smaller emitter and get sustained output for many hours, but I also like to have that “turbo” mode available when necessary. And this thing is so blight it likely would temporarily blind a would-be assailant during an evening walk. At least burn his face - the beam on high is incredibly hot!

Brushless motors can be waterproof; you can even fly a drone underwater if you seal off all the other non-waterproof components. I’d agree there probably is or will be better passive solutions available. It’s very easy to drive an LED to spec and have a flashlight not even get warm during operation on the highest setting, but that seems to contradict an ethos of BLF, of getting the best bang-for-the-buck lumens wise. I know the opinion of a few is that max output not sustainable for an extended period of time is useless. But running under max output for however long the batteries will go until they die, which is not long, in my view is equally useless. Not like the old days when you’d get a flashlight with incandescent bulbs and alkaline batteries, and even if the batteries are almost drained, they still put out some light - which can be pretty important depending on what you do with your light.

…okay, so imagine you own a Formula One racer, a Toyota Camry, and a Fiat 500… :stuck_out_tongue:

Why is it so hard for manufacturers to “fess up” to their flashlights’ real performance specs? Most of them still list specs like “Turbo: 2000 lumens / 90 minutes.” Most all people on this forum can look at that and understand that the words do not mean what they say because we have first hand experience watching our own lights step down in brightness while simultaneously getting scalding hot. We understand that these “runtime” specs might be the same as the continuous runtime for the low and medium modes, but for turbo and sometimes high mode too, they are purely a theoretical statement about battery consumption. The consumer that has not yet been jaded, perhaps like the OP a few weeks/months ago, sees those specifications as a promise of performance while continuously running, though. After all, why shouldn’t runtime be assumed to be continuous? Flashlights are typically kept on when it’s dark, rather than turned off every 90 seconds to cool down before running them for another 90 second stretch. So when the flashlight fails to live up to the promise, it’s seen as the worst kind of consumer deception, done for the purpose of selling more “super bright” flashlights to ignorant consumers rather than for the purpose of making the flashlight more useful.

koziy hit the nail on the head when said “The consumer that has not yet been jaded, perhaps like the OP a few weeks/months ago”
I have been in this hobby for about 6 months, a few thousands in lights later nothing but burns and let downs. It was like when I got started in car audio and wanted just have fun with some booming music, I quickly learned about continuous watts and max watts and how some manufacturers pull the wool over buyers eye with there BS ratings of MAX POWER XXXX WATTS!

Yeah and a few thousand $$ later I was hip to the BS. I stuck to certain brands even though some guys would say “yeah this (fill in name of cheap joke amp) 2000 watts amp is all you need, all you want is to listen to your music right, who needs …? ” Basically what he is saying who wants full boost when you can drive around at posted speed limit with your $$$ car that does 0-60 in < 4 secs. NO MOFO some of us want to feel the bass and what we just paid x paychecks for. Stop BSing customers, give the ones that want the real deal performance and what they paid for and let the mild man-nerds get the wanker lights, pardon my rage.

Here goes some explicit, Astrolux MF04S with 6k lumens, why else would I buy suck a big F light if I wasn’t going to go big with it? Some of us do not want lights as a toys. What do these lights have in common, apart from I own all of them; the BLF Q8, MF04S, MF01, Haikelite mt07S, GT mini, Lumintop odf20c …? I know, they all step down before advertised runtimes in turbo, and they all get hot as fresh shyt if you keep resetting turbo mode.

:open_mouth: . :open_mouth: . :open_mouth: . :open_mouth: That guy has some serious skills!!! :+1:
Wonder how many he crashed before he got that good??

False advertising if it only sustains turbo for 20 microseconds because that’s unusable.

Also false advertising if it is a direct drive flashlight and can only reach turbo on a freshly charged battery.
So if you have used the flashlight at any other mode from the last charge then you never can reach the rated turbo output.

Round 2 ??? :smiley:

A lot of crashes, many years of crashing, I know the guy. He builds and mods his own machines. He is out in CA, travels to East cost a few times a year to fly at many events.
Flying at night is why I need the bigger more powerful throwers.

This what I currently use, it runs ALL NIGHT never overheats or step down, however I am tethered to my car or generator, forget lipo packs. Want to replace this with a portable thrower that can match. Has more distance than MF04S/35, BLF GT/70, any Haikelite or whatever factory thrower Led flashlight that is out there currently.

I can only imagine the years it took to become that good! That was some very impressive flying!! :+1:
Thanks for sharing…. :wink: