Like Speedsix, I dont have a lot of use for sub lumen “moonlight” or blinkies usually.
I am currently in love with Guppydrv firmware, which gives me the option of picking from 20+ mode groups that have what I need, and set turbo timer @ whatever I want.
Plus it uses OFF time memory. :heart_eyes:
In my opinion this is close to perfect UI, since people like the OP, and myself can choose 15/100, or 2/25/100, and others can get their moonlight on, or blinkies if they choose.
Jim
My S20 gets used the most as a night light on my computer desk. It's bright enough even with some ambient light from the streetlight at 2am to check on the baby if he wakes up. In fact, sometimes it's too bright so I switch to my T10S for the lower ML.
Another good use I discovered for ML mode is that it also doubles as a great locator beacon just in case you drop your light. Happened to me in the bedroom, found it easily (rolled under the bed) since it was on ML mode. Drain on ML is also negligible so you can do this for literally forever. (If you're like me you probably have enough batteries to run your light for a few days on high, and I just started with this hobby a few months back).
Although I have to agree that too many modes can be a pain as well if the UI requires the user to cycle through them. That's why I prefer UIs like the S20. ML and high from off.
I live in the woods. And in the winter, when it is cloudy and no moon, and you turn off all outside lights, it gets DARK outside.
Our eyes are very good at adapting to different light levels. But it takes several hours. So if you come from inside the house and bright electric light, you are practically blind. Then you need plenty of light to see.
But if you have let your eyes adapt during the evening, and there is a moon or clear skies with starlight, you can see all around you without problems. Well, you loose colour vision and have to move to see good. And in the shadows where the moon doesn't shine it can still be pretty dark. If you turn on a powerful flashlight then you loose all your nightvision, and can from that moment on only see what you shine your flashlight at. It is under these cirumstances it is good to have a sublumen flashlight. You can get a little extra light and keep your nightvision. Actually I often get by using only a single trit light source. That is enough to see nearby.
If I happen to have kept my nightvision, I like to be able to keep it. And use no high powered flashlight or sublumen. If I have lost my nightvision I have to have much more light, and use a higher mode.
However I always feel a little uncomfortable using a high mode flashlight outside, and not my natural nightvision, because then I can only see what I point my light at. Everything else is completely black. Indoors you can bounce the light on the ceiling and light the whole room easily. And you can use a low enough mode so the light lasts all night.
In an urban environment there are light all around and you most likely never get any real nightvision. There it makes less sense with really low modes. However indoors it can still be useful if you have it dark inside at night.
i have to read delivery slips in a car at night, sometimes while driving. really LOW mode is great for this.
i have little use for strobe, but, i know what its for… you strobe a bad guys eyes and immediately MOVE after cliking off the light… to the enemy, its like you made a “puff!” of smoke and sort of “vanished”.
i make digital night vision from scratch? and a really low mode Infrared zoomie is perfect for close up, otherwise you wash out.
also, i wouldnt mind 8 or 10 modes… all equidistant spaced… HIGH on down to almost nothing would be perfect for in the field. i could set the infrared zoomie for JUST as much infrared light as i needed to see whatever distance i am watching, so as to always have ENOUGH infrared, but, stretching my battery life for longer operating time scanning for ’yotes.
SOS is about useless though… we once put a little light with SOS mode on, on a hill, and no one came to see what the “distress call” was for, we thought it was funny… if people are ALREADY lookign for you? they will approach a lighter out of fluid, seeing the sparks with no flame, lmFao… but if no one is already LOOKING for you? you can SOS mode all night without anyone coming to see whats going on.
I like sub lumen modes for using at work as a train conductor, all shifts working on night trains one way or the other.
People can get very cranky if the lights too bright - I even had a guy go off and get angry and want to fight me for using my gerber recon which is all of 10 lumens at most (sadly for him he got removed by the police for aggressive behavior and missed his next train and wasted 48 hours off his life).
:bigsmile:
Also handy for just wandering around the home if I want to wander around at night with the lights off.
There is a lot of luck involved but still better than nothing. Also very few people know the morse code for SOS and many cheap lights have errors in the code.
The best use for moolight is letting the flashlight on tailstand shining at the ceiling. Nearly infinite runtime and really useful incase of emergency or for keeping an eye.
U NO LIKE NINJA MODE???
we cannot put the useless blinky modes you’ll never use in real life in the same realm of the useful sublumen modes, their utility are almost infinite, you can actually see and not be seen, pure stealth mode.
When i go running in the fields at night i usually have my headlamp off, if the moon permits it, i ’d rather prefer use just the actual enviromental light because you can see farther… A LOT, if you are using let’s say a 10 lumen light (or more) you won’t see at that distance as your eyes would be adapted to that light metering, also people will see you and call some snipers to kill you…. :face_with_monocle:
Let’s also say that you are crawling next to your wife/girlfriend and you don’t want to wake her up, with the room lights you do not use a TN36 in turbo mode with 6500+ lumen….just sayin…
Moonlight mode has one very important function, to identify the nutcases.
Always frustrated by moonmodes too! Adding moon to a 3 mode light can totally change the user interface for the worse.
A few years ago saw someone lying in a crosswalk — who had been hit by a hit-and-run driver — at dusk, in the rain, during commute hours.
I jumped off the bus. I had my one little CR123 flashlight with me.
I heard the sirens, someone had phoned in and told her not to move and she was holding still and aware so I — stood over her in the street and stopped traffic — stopped a three way intersection.
On strobe, that little light was enough to halt multiple vehicles and make approaching vehicles stop, back up to the last intersection and take another route.
I stood there until the emergency vehicles arrived.
She would have been run over several more times — likely I’d have been run over as well — but for the strobe light.
Try it yourself in any crosswalk on any busy street in the dark during a rainy rush hour — which means wintertime, for most folks, so you’ll have to remember this in six months.
Strobe, especially waved up and down/side to side, will get a distracted driver to suddenly focus and after a couple of seconds put on the brakes.
Steady light, even waved up and down/side to side — doesn’t get you noticed for several additional seconds
UNLESS it’s really bright — and if you shine a bright light into a driver’s eyes, in the dark, in the rain, in rush hour —
Do ya feel lucky?
I love the dark and spending hours camping in dark night areas and seeing the stars, and meteor trails, and satellites
and kangaroo mice and toads with their jeweled amazing eyes
and all the rest of what comes out at night when we’re not being bright enough to stop traffic.
And I kind of like having the confidence that I can stop traffic if I need to.
Each to his own.
“Wow” light is for me.
“Wimpy” light is for the wimps.
It is nice to have choices and WE ALL have preferences. I believe EVERY mode on a light is there for a reason. They would NOT have them all if someone in the general public did not have “any” use for them.
I noticed SEVERAL people said “STROBE” is useless. For you it may be, but NOT for me! I doubt if many of you are walking a dog, sometimes on a road, for 70 minutes EVERY night!!
It has no doubt saved me from injury or worse. In the beginning ALL my walks were on the road. I have walked Capo more than 10,000 miles in the 4+ years I have had him!. 3+ during the day and 4+ at night. 8)
I alternate 3 different walks. Two trail walks and One road walk. It is on a dirt road where I see “0” to maybe 4 cars in 70 minutes. The first thing I do when I see a car approaching is to ACTIVATE STROBE and point the light to the ground for ~ 3 or 4 seconds. Believe me that is MORE effective than a straight beam of light that can be confused as a Motorcycle or a Car w/ One headlight!
Some lights[modded] ones do not have strobe anymore. I found that waving the light vigorously from side to side is also effective.
Again, I love high powered throwers. It amazes me how a beam of light from a reflector based flashlight can go over 1 Mile! I have ones that will fit in the palm of my had that throw 500 yards!
So, if we open our minds and are objective, we will find that ML, L, M,H, Turbo, Strobe ect. can be beneficial and useful to a variety of people applying them in different circumstances! 
For me, a good moonlight mode is a tent/dark room-handy feature only--with the off-hand assurance that should I ever be trapped in a cave, I'd have a life-saving amount of run-time. Also, the ability to gaze into the emitter is kind of like a spiritual experience at times. That little part of me that could be called a doomsday prepper is made happy by the moonlight mode. And that's really all I can say about the subject.
I’m a camper and can use my lights for many hours at a time, mostly for close task work, in dark environments. I’m a low lumen snob and use 0.3 / 3 lumens (not ZL lumens) about 45/45% of the time. I almost exclusively buy sub-/low-lumen lights and am a big believer in “the more light you use, the more you need.”
The human eye has an incredible dynamic range - at the beach, I can shine 500 lumens into the palm of my hand and barely see it, yet a “bright” 0.3 moonlight mode can be searingly painful when I first wake from sleep. Both can be used for my close task work - the difference is the time it takes for my eyes to adjust, and ~500 battery changes. Due to the logarithmic way we perceive light, if increasing brightness is subject to the laws of diminishing returns, then reducing brightness is subject to increasing gains.
I sometimes stealth camp (?trespass?) and as someone mentioned above, I prefer to see without being seen… and that includes attracting bugs.
It gets scary outdoors at night so I want all my senses at 100%, and as others mention above, the more light you use, the less night vision you retain. The brighter your ~70 degree cone of light is, the darker the other ~200 degrees of your peripheral vision becomes. For me, using a bright mode outside is like listening to loud music with headphones on - sure the music sounds great, but you won’t have a clue what else is going on around you.
I also find high contrast really annoying for extended use. My eyes try to adjust to the overall scene, so a relatively small high-lux beam/hotspot against a large dark background drives my eyes’ auto exposure crazy. It’s like trying to read with thrower flashlight (whatever lumens), or watching TV and smartphone surfing in the pitch black without lowering screen brightness.
All that said, I’m not a fan firefly/starlight modes (~0.10 lms or less, incl. “0.34” Zebra-lumens). While they’re about perfect for navigating mid-night bathroom runs, they’re are not enough (for me) for extended reading and general close task work. I prefer the “brighter” moonlight modes in the 0.2-0.4 range (Quarks) and will bury the bezel in my fist, using my pinky as an aperture control, for the few moments I need really dim.
The older you get, the less you’re able to see at low light levels.
So as you get older, moonlight mode (and moonlight) will seem less and less useful to you.
This is a good review: http://www.journalofvision.org/content/9/7/18.full
Shorter: brightness is one thing, contrast is something different.
As we age we lose the ability to see low light levels and low contrast subjects.
Contrast is not just light and shadow — it’s also texture: compare the texture in a brick wall versus a window screen — fine textures are seen better by younger people.
That’s one reason older people need to be closer to a highway sign to read it than younger people, even when they both have “20/20” vision — loss of ability to discriminate fine texture.
And the loss is happening both in the eye and in the brain structure, with increasing age.
So if you don’t understand moonlight mode now, don’t worry.
In a few more years, you won’t even notice it’s there.
Wondering why people don’t adapt pen lights as moon light?
I’m photosensitive and nocturnal, so most of the time I only want moon or a single-digit low mode. Anything else is usually too bright.
I’m a camper and wouldn’t do without ML. In fact I like the 2 ML modes in the Tiara Pro. ML1 I leave on all the time like a night light hanging from the tent ceiling (or a motel room nightstand) and ML2 is for navigating in the middle of the night. In the evening after sitting around a fire these modes are useless but at 3am they work great.
I bet I use moonlight mode three or four times as much as the highest modes on my lights. Lots of tasks require a small amount of light, like bathroom trips, finding my sleeping pills or getting something out of my pack at night. The times I actually NEED 1000 lumens are rare. Sure it’s fun to light up a whole yard or a tree at the end of the block but most of the time it’s not something I really needed to do.
If you are in a location with any artificial Street lighting, you probably won’t appreciate nor ever use a sub-lumen light. In the mountains and on the ocean, moonlight mode is all you need to see clearly for 30 or more feet. Comes in handy for reading, fishing, eating, and prepping up close at night, also.
And although I keychain carry a Fenix AAA light, an multi mode light loaded with an 18650 gives you a lot to work with. I carry two multimode lights when I am out rather than bother with a AAA. You can always just cup your hand over the front of the bright light, also