At what LUX/LUMEN LEVEL will EYE DAMAGE likely occur?.......

nottawhackjob · 2018-07-07T05:40:47.000Z

I know the duration of staring into certain hi-power emitters is a big factor in answering that question - that plus each individual’s unique dilation characteristics, much less other variables.

After seeing DBSAR’s tailgated dam illumination, the thought crossed my mind that that’s already a lot of concentrated lumens but then imagined if it was lux focused, why I venture to say I could be seeing a spot or two for weeks, or maybe forever?

I don’t know if this sort of thing has ever been quantified. To wit for example, staring into a BLF Q8 from 3 feet away on turbo for more than 1 minute will likely cause eye damage in most individuals. Or not. Maybe there’s a formula out there.

Laser based flashlights, well that’s a comin’ too.

IDK. Any eye docs in the crowd?

:cowboy_hat_face: :disguised_face: :sunglasses: And then there’s always this for shielding…… :person_facepalming:

DBSAR · 2018-07-07T05:49:25.000Z

It probably would be worse at dark of night. as when we turned on all the lights at the same time, it was so intense it was painful to look at the lights, and looking at the dam when it was lit up was intense as my eyes had adjusted to the night.

Enderman · 2018-07-07T05:57:18.000Z

http://www.optique-ingenieur.org/en/courses/OPI_ang_M01_C02/co/Contenu_09.html

The lumens don’t matter.
The lux will depend on the colour of the light source, your surroundings, etc.
It is not as simple as X lux = eye damage.

nottawhackjob · 2018-07-07T06:03:32.000Z

I knew that lumens wasn’t per se a direct factor here but depending on a particular hi-power emitter the two can be synonymous it seems from a marketing perspective these days.

Enderman · 2018-07-07T06:40:49.000Z

For example, an infrared laser isn’t visible, so technically it has 0 lux and 0 lumens, but it will still burn your retina with enough power.
That’s why in the link I posted it relies heavily on watts per steradian.
A measure of power intensity rather than luminous intensity.

toddcshoe · 2018-07-07T07:16:19.000Z

Please oh please tell me this is a joke. If you need to ask how long you can look into a high output light source, well, you probably shouldn’t have availability to a high output light source.

You better seriously be messing with people. Normal people don’t try and see how long they can look at bright anything before damage occurs. Not to mention not so intelligent example of staring into a Q8 for a minute. Why in the hell would a normal thinking person want to do it for more than a second?

You know, we use to make products for normal people and stupid people would just have to adapt. Now making products for stupid people is it’s own demographic.

You know what, just keep looking into till you work yourself into a totally different forum.

Enderman · 2018-07-07T07:30:11.000Z

toddcshoe:

Please oh please tell me this is a joke. If you need to ask how long you can look into a high output light source, well, you probably shouldn’t have availability to a high output light source.

You better seriously be messing with people. Normal people don’t try and see how long they can look at bright anything before damage occurs. Not to mention not so intelligent example of staring into a Q8 for a minute. Why in the hell would a normal thinking person want to do it for more than a second?

You know, we use to make products for normal people and stupid people would just have to adapt. Now making products for stupid people is it’s own demographic.

You know what, just keep looking into till you work yourself into a totally different forum.

It is entire possible that an accidental exposure happens with a laser, even if it doesn’t go directly into your eye it could reflect off of something and still blind you.

NOHD is not about how long you can stare into a light source, it is about what distance is required for the human blink reflex to be fast enough to prevent damage.

With flashlights getting more and more powerful it is definitely a concern, however it will be a while before a regular flashlight can cause serious damage without using a concentrating lens.

toddcshoe · 2018-07-07T07:40:23.000Z

Lasers are different. The human blink takes place in about 300 milliseconds. Not total blink from eyelid closed to eyelid back open.The eyelid will be closed in 300. Protecting your eyes form lasers, if you live in a place where lasers are being thrown about at peoples eyes, may be difficult. Protecting your eyes from a bright light of any source is as easy as looking away quickly. Or blinking and looking away at the same time. It happens, we all do it everyday. Look into bright lights, you will go blind, don’t look, you won’t. It’s really that easy.

Enderman · 2018-07-07T07:52:30.000Z

toddcshoe:

Lasers are different. The human blink takes place in about 300 milliseconds. Not total blink from eyelid closed to eyelid back open.The eyelid will be closed in 300. Protecting your eyes form lasers, if you live in a place where lasers are being thrown about at peoples eyes, may be difficult. Protecting your eyes from a bright light of any source is as easy as looking away quickly. Or blinking and looking away at the same time. It happens, we all do it everyday. Look into bright lights, you will go blind, don’t look, you won’t. It’s really that easy.

With enough laser power the eye does not close fast enough to prevent permanent damage.
That’s what the entire point of NOHD is.
It is a scientific safety rating of the distance where damage becomes permanent because 300ms is too slow to prevent your retina from burning.

OP is asking about what kind of power is necessary for a regular light to cause damage.
A laser is literally just a very intense source of light.
A flashlight is not somehow fundamentally different from a laser to magically not cause any eye damage…
As I said, for regular flashlights like the type you use it is not an issue, but as power continues increasing then it is certainly possible that a flashlight will become as dangerous as a laser.

Obviously extending the period of exposure increases the probability of damage, but that’s a completely different matter than “will this blind you at X distance or not”

toddcshoe · 2018-07-07T08:00:39.000Z

Enderman · 2018-07-07T08:58:03.000Z

toddcshoe:

That’s exactly how I feel explaining this to you.
Were you not aware that an average 1W 450nm laser will instantly blind you at about 100m distance? In less time than the human blink reaction.

If I built a flashlight with the same power output per steradian it would also blind you at 100m.
That is because the wavelength of light isn’t what matters, the radiated power output intensity is.

Tom_Tom · 2018-07-07T11:16:54.000Z

An important thing to be concerned about is if you use a UV torch, in dark conditions. The UV is bad for you eyes anyway, but when the pupil is wide open, far more so. Always use eye protection, clear plastic lenses usually block it completely, they don’t need to be tinted. Easy enough to test with something that fluoresces, even just some white paper.

Powerful UV torches can be as bright as a good white LED, just you can’t see it, your pupil won’t contract, no blink response, the wavelength is very damaging, altogether quite dangerous, not something to allow untrained people to use, nevermind children.

Natural reaction: “I turned it on but it doesn’t seem to be working. I’ve looked into the reflector and fiddled with it but there’s just a faint glow”. Add a ZWB2 filter … Oops.

The big problem with lasers is that the beam is collimated so will be focussed to a tiny spot on the retina, if visible the natural reaction is to look at it, so it’ll probably burn out the most important part of the retina, in milliseconds. Has happened to airline pilots, and is banned for military use:

Almost any of the high powered lasers that are used as toys are more than capable of blinding, even just a diode pulled from a DVD burner.

en.wikipedia.org

Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons

The Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, Protocol IV of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, was issued by the United Nations on 13 October 1995. It came into force on 30 July 1998. As of the end of April 2018, the protocol had been agreed to by 109 nations. The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and three annexed protocols were adopted on 10 October 1980 and opened for signature on 10 April 1981. In 1986, Sweden and Switzerland pushed for the Blinding Laser Protocol. Dur...

As for the OP’s question, I don’t know. But put your hand in front of a Q8 on turbo and you’ll realise in a few seconds how burning hot it is. Blink reflex is easily overcome if you insist on burning your eyes out, always a few sad cases after solar eclipses. If you are lucky you’ll just have spots before your eyes for a while, but that’s still quite bad, damage has been done, and is accumulative.

nottawhackjob · 2018-07-07T13:11:51.000Z

We’ll I have to be honest here as I have from time to time held certain newly acquired hi-power torches at eye level (especially during daytime) and quickly flashed/scanned it into a mirror from let’s say 10 feet away to gage just how bright the sucker truly is against the human condition. Or if the thing has a particularly different strobe cadence to see its effects.

I don’t think this a good idea anymore. Not with the kind of stuff we’re messing with today. Then with all the gizmos emitting IR or UV even moreso.

Lasers, forget about it. I respect the hell out of them - inexpensive versions or not.

The main point why I brought this up is that we’re used to the blink reflex protecting us but as pointed out above, don’t necessarily rely upon it with the power intensities we’re seeing nowadays. I also didn’t mean to imply a lot of peeps we’re gonna go blind because we’re typically all so stupid enough to continously stare into an emitter and not use common sense otherwise.

DBSAR’s comment that his demo was painful to look at is a case in point. Not that it was dangerous per se like a laser is but just that it’s getting more commonplace that the outputs we’re dealing with is a possible cumulative adverse factor to consider. That’s all.

Well anyway, it’s good I think that occasionally we get reminded.

eas · 2018-07-07T15:40:00.000Z

“clear plastic lenses usually block it completely, they don’t need to be tinted.”

I’d be cautious of this rule of thumb.

I have a ~5” magnifying lens on a gooseneck stand I bought at Costco ~5 years back. It’s clear plastic. I tested it recently. It passes enough UV that an old Inova UV flashlight I have lit up flux residue when shined through it. It emits enough visible light that I guess it could be the shortest visible wavelengths causing the florescence.

In any case, it’s worth doing a quick test by shining the UV source through the lens at something florescent (like, say, an unpowered white LED emitter) to verify.

I just tested my reading glasses against an unlit LED. They failed too.

FWIW, cheap plastic sunglasses do block UV. I tested a few pairs back when I had access to a UV/VIS spectrophotometer.

eas · 2018-07-07T15:46:48.000Z

Ok. Now I don’t know what to think. I gathered 4 pairs of sunglasses, three cheap and one pair of RayBan Cateys.

When I shined UV source was shined through them, as expected, all cut much but not all of the visible light.

When a white LED emitter was illuminated with the filtered light, florescence was significantly lower than when illuminated with the unfiltered source. However, that reduction seemed more closely related to the reduction in the visible blue light, than to elimination of UV.

Of course, I don’t know what the emission spectra of these UV LEDs are. It could be that most of their energy is actually visible blue, rather than UV. They are, probably 10y old.

nottawhackjob · 2018-07-07T16:22:36.000Z

I was planning to use a UV flash for scorpion a lot this summer. Now only with protective glasses after reading this.

Lux-Perpetua · 2018-07-07T16:34:04.000Z

Did I get this right? When using a UV flashlight it is highly recommended to put on glasses that block UV radiation? I’m not planning to direct the lightbeam into my eyes, of course. But is there an immanent danger of UV radiation reflected from illuminated objects such as white walls etc.?

I once used my Convoy S2+ with Nichia UV at home while it was dark outside. I was shocked how intense objects like white curtains started to glow.

WalkIntoTheLight · 2018-07-07T16:45:04.000Z

Direct sunlight at mid day is about 50k - 100k lux. You don’t want to look at the sun for more than a few seconds, and probably shorter than that.

I’m guessing the BLF Q8 is close to 50k lux at 3 feet. So, consider it like the sun. Don’t look at it. If you do this for several minutes, you’re probably going to get permanent eye damage. If you do it for several minutes, you probably already have permanent mental damage.

Lux-Perpetua · 2018-07-07T17:39:57.000Z

WalkIntoTheLight:

[…]If you do it for several minutes, you probably already have permanent mental damage.

:laughing: :+1:

Tom_Tom · 2018-07-07T18:45:10.000Z

I have a very good set of laser range finding binoculars for another interest.

IR laser.

They are the civilian spec. so artificially limited to 1760 yards (one mile), more than good enough for me, but up to then they work superbly. And the spot size is small and precise.

I’ve measured the current draw whilst pinging and it is massive. I seriously would not want one pointed at me, whilst looking at it.

Nor would I try pinging e.g. a military plane.

As for keeping the button pressed down and continuously measuring, including velocity measurement

Coming soon to a laser trap on the roads near you …

(A modern windscreen will block it, not so for a biker with their visor up)