+1 on Chiefinspectorfinch point, a real dark surrounding is the best premise to impress someone.
On May this year I was at an offroad race that had a night stage too. We were in the middle of woods, pitch black. My friend was complaining that with his videocamera built-in light he had no chances for a night footing, I said no problem and switched on the DRY. I got more than one WOW! coming from bystanders, we were standing on the high side of a valley and from there was able to enlight enough the whole track to keep on filming and footage was good enough that some action scenes were choosen for the DVD too.
I got more than one person that night coming and asking what kind of flashlight I was using.
On the other hand trying to impress someone in an urban environment with lots of light pollution hardly gets any satisfaction...
I have 30+ lights and not one is a thrower. But 90% of my light use is indoors, both at home and work. And I live in the middle of a city, with few genuinely dark places and not very many open spaces to use a thrower. Isn’t this just a case of “horses for courses?”
Or is it that deep seated, age old argument of length vs. diameter? :bigsmile:
I’m going to settle this once and for all and I’m going to be dogmatic about it. lol
The throwers (any of them) are generally way, way more impressive than any flooder. And it’s not true that people in general don’t notice bright lights; they do, and they let out a “Holy Sh!” sure enough—but not when something like a car is driven into a lake because then their minds are on other things. But when you’re walking the dog or jogging or hiking and (as stated) light pollution is low, the brightness comes out and that’s when people notice and let out the exclamations.
Throwers are always better. When looking for something, it just makes more sense to control your light and illuminate what is at a distance. There are needs for flooders, but as emphasized, most lights we see everyday do that. My MC-E zoomie is the BEST flooder there is. No joke—the best—and I’ll put it against anything, but an XR-E or huge reflector-ed XM-L (HD2010 or V2) will be more useful and more impressive by a landslide. The matter is settled.
Can’t say anything about the heatsinking but it uses a DRY driver… so the 2600 lumens you’ve come to expect from the DRY you can expect from the new clone
To be able to influence something at a distance is the most impressive thing about throw. To be able to reach out and “touch” someone. It gives the feeling of omnipotence.
I wanted to insert this movie clip but could not find it. does anybody know which movie this scene is from?
It is where the protagonist and the antagonist are standing on the top of a temple and the “bad guy leader ” raises his hand, and way off in the distance his subjects do something. He turns to the “good guy” and says something to the effect “Now that’s power”
While I understand the point about throwers being more impressive, I'm a flood fan. Its not that there arent spots here to use a thrower.. but I prefer a wall of light.
it’s a lot easier to turn a thrower into a spiller than to turn a spiller into a thrower. There’s something to be said for that IMO if someday for whatever reason I could use the option. You know, like the end of the world kinda days. Afterall, we only have 71 days left before 12/21/2012. 8)
Which brings up a good point. Have any of you easily transformed a real thrower from the factory (like a Jacob A60) into a real spiller just by swapping reflectors from SMO to OP and for that matter vice versa? I’m not talking about hard-core mods here. Just something like a reflector change or maybe even raising or lowering the LED reflector-wise. (Hey, maybe that would be a hardcore mod so disregard if contradictory.)
(And here I sat thinking this thread was meh, pretty dead.)
With a lot of sputtering and scotch tape I was able to do it, however the spill was brighter originally then after the mod. :( Yes, there was that much loss in brightness.
but the more posts I read on BLF the consistent high majority of them regard helping them find a light with ‘more throw’ or are just plain discussions about extracting that little extra lux at 1m out of their already pretty dang good thrower by pretty much any means possible - ya know like de-doming which from what’ve gathered btw is about 20% successful except for let’s say the professionals. lol
I can’t remember the last one that was adamant about finding a light with ‘more flood’ or asking for comparison beam shots showing as such. It’s just a tickler to me is all. :bigsmile:
