What is the brightest budget light?

http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=259443. CPF does have its uses.

Also has pics of an insanely expensive ROP which to me totally misses the point.

If I wanted to go down that road I'd go for Philips 5761 bulbs, soft start and silly, silly money. But rather a lot of light.

12V / 100W halogen spotlights are the most Lumens / $$.

They typically are in the ~1300L (bulb lumens) range. I got this one for $19.

http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/8782/dscn6146l.jpg

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/5370/dscn6145.jpg

At $79, the Stanley HID is also a real bargain. It will out-throw an Olight ST90. I am not sure what its lumen output is though.

Where did you get that one for 19 bones.....those are not even at that price range.....I have a 55w BD light that my wife bought for me years ago and that only gets used once in awhile.

$19.? Now that's what I call a budgetlight! :D

This was used for long range.....but the only thing that i didnt like about it was that the continuous use was only 10m......

My wife picked it up at a Big Lots discount store. I replaced the 100W H4 bulb with a 55W bulb, its filament is aligned axially so it really THROWS.

its one of my brightest lights, even with the lower wattage lamp.

There are many good bright flashlight ,

TrustFire C8 3-mode High Power P7 900-Lumen LED Flashlight $36.54

TrustFire TR-650 4 Cree P4 3-Mode 650-Lumen LED Flashlight $40.99

TrustFire ST-50 LED Flashlight Black $79.99

TrustFire X2 SST-50 40-Mode 1300 Lumens LED Flashlight Black (3x18650) $128.99

you can have a look !

You could do a lot worse than the good old Ultrafire C3. Just the plain, poor quality aluminium one. When loaded with a 14500 they are crazy bright (and flaky but easy enough to sort out).

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.18305

Avoid the multi-mode ones and avoid the Aurora equivalents like the plague - they are really flaky.

Dang the wife and i shop there sometimes and all i see are the plastic cheap lights that all stores carrry.

Yeah it was a one in a million thing... right place at the right time. My brother went to 4-5 different stores before he finally found one.

I have the Pro Favorite 20 million cp model (120watt bulb), the Etek HID(4300k bulb) and Brinkmann Max III with a 100watt bulb, although they are a lot of fun they are also a pain to carry around. I was really referring to flashlights not spotlights.

The tr-1200 still seems to be the best deal, the Trustfire st-50 looks real interesting, and at the moment I'm waiting to see what Shiningbeam puts out with the new MG RX-1 st-50 model.

Nice try, none of these come even near to 1000 lumens.

That 5xCree may be close.

Unfortunately, the problem with chinese vendors/suppliers that they push out hundreds of products, all with confusing branding, and nobody guarentees specs on anything. Could be good, could be bad, but if no one can tell, why put any effort into a good product?

It hardly cost anything, and if anything cost less, to stick with a few quality products. It's a poor mentality they have that they'll put out 100 items, and even if they can fool a few people to buy each one, they can make at least a couple thousand dollars. Of course, that may be the last couple dollars they''ll make, but hey, get rich quick. They have absolutely no real business sense. That's why companies in the west can make millions and billions, and they fight over crumbs.

This is far from the whole story. If I look around me, probably 80% of the manufactured items in this house, including the chair I am sitting on and the shoes I am wearing, were made in China. This is true for much of the planet. OK it may be Western firms that are creaming off all the profits - 500% markups appear to be the norm but who made them? One day the huge profit making stuff will also be done in China.

Except for the surgical tools that were all made in Pakistan. The expensive European branded ones are simply Pakistani ones with better chroming.

In the nineteenth century one of the bigger exports from the US to Europe (apart from raw materials where all the profit is in what is done with them) was affordable clocks. The clocks were made as cheaply as it is possible to make a clock mechanism but sold in huge amounts to European distributors who put the cheap and nasty mechanisms into cases and sold them at a huge markup. This is nothing new.

OK it may be Western firms that are creaming off all the profits - 500% markups appear to be the norm but who made them? One day the huge profit making stuff will also be done in China.

No, the story I tell is quite the whole one, especially for smaller podunk firms like the ones we deal with here. I talk about the mentality because I've seen and been told about it first hand by people who do business there. It's the disease which along with corruption is keeping the country down. It's small mindedness and greed: quick buck today at the expense of tomorrow is how people do business when they don't have proper business education/training.

There's a reason why the western firms are making all the money while the hard laborers in china make jack shit. One understands how to conduct big business properly and one doesn't. From the frustrations we deal with in our budget hobby, I think this should be quite clear.

For example, in business school, you're taught to market certain products in 3 tiers. For the same mass product with possible differentiators, you have the low end basic, often loss leader, model to bring in the customer's interest. Then you have the medium tier model which has all the standard features most people want for a reasonable increase, and that's what most people would buy because the former is purposely somewhat crippled. Finally what you need is the top deluxe version which is purposely not a good value, and while some people will always may more for the best model, the point is to help the majority of your customers justify and find the value in their purchase. Instead, you see from china dozens of complete randomly permutated models from the same make, even for the same kind of light.

Ultrafire needs to stick to one general purpose medium size (18650?) cree light, the "best" but distinguished design (eg 504b with a twist in style), with maybe the lowest bin and no modes for cheap light, a good bin with modes for the one everyone buys, and a quad-die or xp-g with programmable modes for best model, and make all 3 with consistent quality. If you need to introduce a new model, don't just throw it up on the DX site; you need to announce the new big thing (2011 models!) and even build up a sense of anticipation at regular intervals. Then people aren't confused which one to get and why does the one I get differ from what my friend got last week, etc. While we addicts will buy all the variants, most normal people won't and that's where the money is.

From DX's persepective, they need to apply this pressure to the supplier instead of getting dragged along by them, but of course they won't because they feel the few pennies they make selling a few extra models on their site to some small time third-world buyer is totally worth it. Narrow minded thinking is what limits their business, and ironically we see dozens of copy-cats of exactly what they do WRONG. They have absolutely no business discipline and that's why they'll easily get crushed by any western company if they ever find some market segment that's making real money.

Again, a lot of good business practice is counterintuitive to those without the education, and usually the ones we see are the overly greedy type (the ones who made the mistake of going the other way tend to get squeezed out by the time they get to us in the west). What I'm saying is more constructive criticism than bashing, but of course they don't listen because they're idiots so I guess it might as well be bashing.

I found it!

http://www.popbuying.com/detail.pb/sku.brightest_led_flashlight-%2021167#

Thanks for the laugh mate. Made my day.

adjective they use for LED lights is "superbright" in my eyes. They use it litterally for any crappy 5mm LED light. I hate it.

Well they are, as long as you are comparing them to 9 glow-worms shoved in the same housing. The glow worms where I used to live in Zambia looked just like low powered green LEDs in the dark. :)

It's the purple that makes it brightest. Sort of like red for cars.