LEP Real World Uses

“So what the heck do you do with a light that is all throw and zero spill?”

1. amateur astronomy. shows someone “there it is” better than my green laser.
2. reading road signage where there is no lighting and the headlights have the wrong angle.
3. trespasser warning. this has been posted before. animal or human. so far, so good.

I don’t own a LEP (yet) and I haven’t seen one in real life either.

For me the portability is the most interesting thing. I have throwers but they’re big and I wouldn’t want to carry them around with me all the time.

I’m hoping that LEPs mean that one day I can EDC something with over 1000m throw (250kcd). Either as a second light or maybe adjustable to flood somehow. I don’t see why we couldn’t get 14500 or 16340 LEPs one day.

I’d also like to go on a night hike with a 2000m thrower (1Mcd) that easily fits in a jacket pocket, instead of needing a rucksack.

Chimney or well inspection.

A light with a mile throw for a chimney inspection?

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Probably a stupid question, but isn’t there a way to diffuse the beam of LEP flashlights to give them more spill?

Automotive companies are now using lasers for their headlights, so there must be a way to make these laser flashlights more practical. And apparently laser light is more efficient than LED, so there seems to be a benefit to move towards this technology.

What’s the point in getting a $200 LEP if you are going to put a $1 diffuser on on it?

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So why do LEP flashlights only have narrow beams? If they are more efficient, why not give them more spill and more practicality?

These look like fun lights, gotta get one. :white_check_mark:

A LEP is a thrower by default. If you want spill, get a 4*XHP70.2
The narrow beam of a LEP gets the most throw out of a modest power consumption.
I found the post about looking into a well very useful.
With a regular light you can’t see much because you are blinded by the reflection on the walls.
And hunting of course. Without waking up the whole forest.

We only see LEPs with lenses,

If you use it in reflector,you have your spill,

Put it in a zoom,you can play.

Regards Xandre

I got the acebeam w30 4000k (yellow) specifically to look into wells mostly during daylight hours. These are 6 inch drilled wells where I want to see the water level that may be 20 to 100 ft deep. Typically there is 1 in pipe and wire and often wire guides that obstruct a lot of the bore. There are some things I want to see on the walls but mostly I just want a good reflection off of the water level. Once you get past 30 ft nothing else compares to an LEP because I can put all of the light on the water and not light up the walls. I also use it to look into shallow/dug wells that are usually 30 to 50 inches diameter and less than 20 ft deep with water anywhere from 2 to 15 ft deep. On the shallow wells I want to be able to look down through the water to see the bottom to look for dead mice or other “things”. It also works extremely well looking into any deep dark hole whether it’s a cave a tunnel an animal hole a multi-story chimney etc. Daytime or night time if you’re looking at eaves under a multi story house that are in shadows or on a cloudy day and you want to see small details such as Carpenter bee holes or other insect damage that is two or three stories up it is hard to beat a LEP. It is not useful for lighting your path 3 to 100 ft in front of you while taking a walk at night. It’s not convenient to carry on your person but I don’t need to do that. Do most people need one? No. I could justify the cost because I knew I was going to use it on a somewhat regular basis. It is an amazing feeling to have one in your hand.

Also if people want to understand why less or no spill can be very beneficial you should watch all three segments of Martin’s “bunker beamshots” on YouTube. He shows many lights that most people would assume would easily light up the end of the tunnel 130 to 150 meters away and you can’t see the end of the tunnel with many of them. The camera view is not like being there but he explains it very well.

Signaling is another use .

They are not more efficient.
Their lm/W is pretty low.

They just have much higher intensity, cd/mm^2
This means it is great for throw, not for making high lumens.

Also the ANSI distance standard of 0.25 lux is not very realistic.
Unless there is little to no moonlight and you’re shining the light on a bright surface, it’s hard to see 0.25 lux.

So a 2km advertised beam is actually practically more like 500-1000m.
And a 400m beam from an LED flashlight is more like 200m usable.

So really LEP is just making it more practical and easier to see stuff at longer distances, but nothing unreasonably far.
If you’re trying to see something that’s 100m away, having the spot brightness be 5lux or 10lux is definitely more visible than 0.25 lux.
Now you can get that in a pocket sized light with a small diameter head instead of something BLF-GT sized.

Yeh, I was gonna chime in that some people I know would go visit “Der Bunker” which has loooooooong stretches of featureless tunnels, and the only way to see any distance away is to have a light with near-zero spill.

Back when, the D Mags were king in that you could tighten up the beam pretty narrow and they weren’t overly bright to wash out the immediate foreground, but even so they still didn’t have much “reach”. The beam just goes on into blackness.

Then came silly ol’ zoomies, which were better’n nothing if only because of near-zero spill vs the Mags.

With a LEP, you can actually see a long ways off no problem, several times the range of the others.

Mounting it on my binoculars. Less weight, no useless spill, smaller. But I’ll wait until there’s something like Intellibeam that dims the light down when needed. Price must be below $100. So I’ll likely wait forever.

It only throws a mile at night. Try it at noon on a sunny day and you’re lucky to see it a few hundred feet.

I dont know why but none of my lights work as well during the day.

Ok, so far we have for real world uses: (1) Looking into a well, and (2) Looking for buoys while sailing.

How about this real world use, annoying the grown-ups:

while we were out camping with a group of friends last week and the grown-ups were chilling by a camp fire, talking and guitar music, I gave my “Neals Thrower” to one of the kids, they went off with it and you could spot where they were all the time because they were shining it around like a lightsaber fight, then from across the field in the distance they discovered that it was fun to annoy our cosy gathering by blinding us and they were way too far away to do something about it :neutral_face: