Thrower & Flooder Beamshots (Very Photo Heavy)

I believe it is called Montgomery County Park. Its on HWY 149 about 3-1/2 miles north of 105. Rather than stick your head out the winder and watch, grab what you got and come on down and join the party. There is never too many lights! Lol.

That FF4.. I needs it! Thanks for sharing!

Hmmm…might have to take you up on that. Wouldn’t be able to add much to your impressive collection…but it would be fun!

That’s what it’s all about. Definitely a blast!

Great job, guys! Thanks for sharing your hard work, guys. 8)

right on brothers! thanks very much for your time and hard work on this showdown.
i spent a good amount of time comparing each picture, and i enjoyed looking at them.
looks like the modded vinh tn31 took the price, ff4 came in second, and vinh k40 took silver.

but my overall favorite was the tom e modded btu shocker because of the brightness in spill and still very good throw.

i havent seen a j12 in a while, and to see that up in the mix, i was actually impressed. i wish you had more of these long tube multi emitters like the 7, 9, 12, and 15 xmls just because i love flooders.

makes me kinda want a j12 for my dad. is it for sale? haha

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Can anyone do a “mouse over for the short and long range FF4 vs TN31 6.5a

rdrfronty

Is that a drop-off just before the 1st target? Looking at bright foreground just before target and trees framing target in FF4 long range pic. Could full hotspot been a little shallow?

thanks you guys work! Wish I could have been there and had a beer or two!

Sorry. Lol. I just bought it myself. It is a nice floody light for sure. I just bought the beast driver for it from KD so hopefully in a few weeks it will be even nicer than it already is.

There is a slight drop off about 75m before the 300m target. It also is about the point the county starts maintaining/mowing the grass better. This the grass line you can see.
The main reason you see those trees looking brighter than the 300m target area is because they are much closer. The the trees in that channel stop at about 200m from the lights. It is an open field for the last 100m. Still some trees to the right, but they have little effect on the shots.
I’m not by my computer until this evening, so i cant do the direct comparison until this evening. Anybody else handy at doing it is welcome to do mouse overs or whatever if they get a chance.

Enjoying this a whole bunch, thanks for all your efforts guys.
Going to have to kick someone off their PC so I can sit down and really eyeball it on a bigger and better screen.

FF4 mouse out if it works (does in the editor but not preview). My first mouseover attempts -credit to JohnnyMac from https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/15452
EDIT - Apparently I can follow directions . .

Gee that FF4 is impressive, gotta be my next light

Awesome! thanks

Great shots and all are well controlled to show their performance. Thanks for doing this.
My input to your camera settings is to set bigger aperature. F/13 will need longer shutter time that can cause blurry picture, F/5.6 is fine for this kind of beamshots and your shutter time will be shorter.

The Yezl 85wt HID battery is fully charged and we took it out to the same exact location and did some beamshots like all of the rest. It is no FF4 but still did pretty well. We added the shots of it to the original 29 lights.

Going strictly from my observations while comparing beam shots, I thought the SBT-70 mod would have done better. Please dont get me wrong… its certainly no slouch. Thanks for all of your hard work!

Well, I thought it did pretty good actually, especially compared to its original form. And considering the SR90’s have been around for about 3 yrs now. In an ever changing technology like LED’s, thats a VERY long time. When the SR90 was stock with a SST90 it threw 144k. At that time there wasn’t another LED that could be bought that would out throw it.
Soon the TN31 and a few other lights came out started getting real close to the SR90’s throw. So I dedomed the SST90. That brought the throw up to about 195k. So again it was a leader among LED’s.
Then people discovered dedoming in XML’s. So again those pesky TN31’s started catching up to the SR90 and some passed it.
So I finally managed to get a SBT70 and get Vinh to install it for me. Again the SR90 was a leader. But AGAIN those pesky TN31’s had another trick under their sleeves. Now dedomed XP-G2’s & XML2’s - some driven at twice their rated amps. So yeah they trumped the mighty SR90 again.
Hopefully one day my SR90 will swat those darn pesky TN31’s down again. Perhaps a nice 14A driven SBT70 in that big arse reflector will do the trick?
Anyway, what the fall of the SR90 really means is just how darn impressive these new modded TN31’s and K40’s are.
But yeah, the SR90 has seen its better days. It’s a huge light. And in stock form it would get its butt kicked bad now days. But it’s still one of my favorite lights. And as long as it keeps kicking and trying, I won’t give up on it.

Guys, following Ilikeflashlights foot steps, I think were going to just keep this thread as continuous thread. As we get any new lights capable of 300m or over 2000 lumens, or get personal requests for any other lights, were going to post them in this thread.
That is for as long as I can use the same camera, same targets, etc. to keep things as consistent as possible.
We’ll just update the title as we add any new lights.

Great effort on the pictures. A few photography pro tips will give you better results next time:

1. Use the self-timer feature, set to 5 seconds or more. Some of your photos have motion blur, even though you used a tripod.
2. Step the aperture way, way down from F13. Try F8. Doing this will enable Step 3.
3. Bring the ISO down closer to 100. You have a Canon so the lowest might be 50. This will result in less grain and a clearer image overall.
4. Make sure the focus is set perfectly, and then push it to manual and don’t touch it until you change focal lengths.
5. Not a photography tip, but it’d be useful to have targets at 50m, 75m, 100m, and 200m. This could easily be accomplished by using plastic 18”x24” signs similar to those that litter the roads during election week. They have metal frames the width of a coat hanger that punch right into the ground.

Your flashlight collection is very impressive. The photography will come with time. Thanks again.

Thanks for the tips. I’m still learning on the Canon, and DSLR’s period. My timer was set at 2 sec and I fully agree about the blur. I got it in quite a few shots. It’s also partly to blame by a not so great Tripod. So I will look into getting a more solid tripod and setting the timer longer.
I knew that a lower ISO would give me better quality images, but I was having a hard time getting the right amount of “what you truly see” light level without extending the exposure time too long. Same applied to the Fstop. Bugs love these bigger lights, especially the HID’s, so It was hard to prevent bug blurs in the images. All said, I know I need to work on lowering the ISO and the Fstop. I just need to experiment more. And lots of practice.
One of the issues I had was on focusing. I couldn’t get the auto focus to work on a 300m target in the dark. So I had to use manual focus. And even that is difficult at 300m in the dark. I tend to use my zoom to bring the target in closer and focus it at that point via the LCD, then position the focal length to the desired point. Likely that’s not the best way to do it. The camera has a audible beeps when it gets proper focus in manual, I just need to trust it more I guess.
The closer targets is something we wanted to do, at least a 100m & 200m, but we never got around to it. It takes a fair amount of work to do the setup we had and we just ran out of time. But yeah, It would be helpful to have the closer targets too.