I've been a flashaholic for years and I still don't get the obsession with ultra low modes.

LED Flashlights – General Info
26

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…

27

Moonlight mode has one very important function, to identify the nutcases.

28

Always frustrated by moonmodes too! Adding moon to a 3 mode light can totally change the user interface for the worse.

29

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.

30

“Wow” light is for me.
“Wimpy” light is for the wimps.

31

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! :wink:

32

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.

33

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.

34

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.

35

Wondering why people don’t adapt pen lights as moon light?

36

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.

37

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.

38

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.

39

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

40

I am not sure if anyone else has brought this up before.

I find that 0.1 lumens in a big SMO reflector (like Acebeam K50 or T08) can be quite useful, as the big reflector can turn the little lumens into a ‘more useful’ hotspot which can still illuminate things in many situations. While I don’t know exactly how much lumens does my former K50 put out on ML mode, it can still ‘throw’ about 1 meter in a completely dark room and my eyes weren’t adjusted to darkness yet.

Lumens indicates the ‘brightness’ of a particular light source, and the way you direct the light is important. If a large reflector/lens is used to focus it then it is a different story to me.

41

If you are in a tent with someone else who is sleeping but you want to read, what is better than a headlamp with moonlight mode?

What I find amazing is how short sighted some people are. When something is of no use to them they simply cannot grasp the concept of it being useful for someone else.

42

I think high powered flash lights are fun, my brightest is a K40M. But several thousands of lumens is seldom useful, just fun. At the most a few hundred lumens is enough, along with good runtime. Or very low output to preserve my night vision.

I think very high output often makes you see less. You see what you shine the light at fine, but you can't see anything else around you. Unless you use a diffuser or bounce the light in the ceiling.

43

Best post ever. Hehe

44

I can see the use of these ultra low mode but I don’t use them enough to justify a dedicated mode on my main light. I’m sure if I daily needed a ML mode, I would look for a light that had one but that seems like a very specialized task and shouldn’t be a main mode. Hidden mode like most strobes are? Fine.

So what I propose is all strobes and firefly modes be forever banished to hidden mode territory. Bury them all deep where we don’t have to cycle through them to get to our real light. No normal person carries a 18650 flashlight to have .003 lumen that he could get from the smallest, cheapest, crappyiest light ever. I didn’t become a flashaholic to have weak wimpy light that nobody can see anything with.

45

+1

AFAIK, no GB flashlights bragged about having a moonlight. But some even bragged about “Wow” like this GB A6 with “OVER 5A!” in the subject line.