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.
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
If ya don’t want spill cuz it interferes with a personal objective then an LEP makes sense for YOU just like wanting extra flood for a specific personal reason can also make sense.
Rationalizing and excluding either for general flash typical everyday routine applications is like saying one shouldn’t deviate from the norm becuz it doesn’t facilitate the norm therefore it’s inherently useless.
I don’t use an expensive calibrated torque wrench except for exceptional requirements. That doesn’t mean I’m stupid for owning a torque wrench.
Martin’s bunker beam shot (4) videos show that the LEP lights put more light on target then all of the other lights that he brings down there. The target being the end of the tunnel at 130-150 meters. All of the other lights are on turbo and they still can’t compete and they will step down. So you don’t have to have targets that are 1000-2000 meters out. Seeing a target and being able to see details on that target are two different things. I don’t have a need for multi emitters that put out a wall of light short or long term. I can appreciate flashlights that push the limits. The bunker shots may seem extreme but the same thing applys in your house looking down a hallway that may be 10 or 30 ft. If your flashlight is lighting up the walls right in front of you then your ability to see small details on the wall at the end is reduced partly because your pupils will be more constricted than they would be with a tight beam putting more light on the target.
The zoomie in the video is very big but you can see that the aspheric lens has a similar effect to the LEP.
I’d be very interested to see how a smaller aspheric, like the $30 Convoy Z1 Osram (about 175kcd), compares to the slightly smaller but much more expensive 350kcd LEPs.
Cut with a water jet, switched individually, handle is just to carry it but I have been looking for a scope to go on it. It is a beast of a light, another 12 would be over the top but fun to play with.
My complements to whoever made this video. I find it so much more useful than shining a light at a tree. This shows the real capability of the LEP however it also shows its limitations. The LEP clearly penetrates deeper into the tunnel. This is a truly incredible video. It makes all the other flashlight test videos look amateur.
