Ok, I have a light everyone can love that will show that a place like BLF can see a need and fill it, as well be instrumental in perfecting something simple and old as time like the flashlight.
Soooo…I fell pretty damn hard for mules after thinking they were an absurd concoction of flashlight enthusiasts with too much money burning a hole in their pocket. Sorry about that McGizmo, I now see the error of my ways. I’m now of the mind that the best light one can still cary to see ones surroundings best, is a mule, And honestly, it’s not even close. Having a light with any kind of projection is so inefficient for normal use to see 10-20 feet around you. A mule DESTROYS those lights at close range. But we all know that that overwhelming victory mules easily claim at close range, comes at the expense of any potential outward punch. So has this actually been addressed yet? Thats rhetorical, obviously it has not. At least not at a true consumer level anyway.
Let me further my initial point about mules physical light-emitted efficiency being far superior for the “close surroundings” use-case. When I use my linear driver mules and they regulate to whatever base output they go down to, it’s still a significant amount of useful light. A big part of it is the way our eyes are able to adjust to mules. It’s essentially identical to the way camera sensors can easily adjust and use any minimal ambient light, and still produce a great photo. With mules, our eyes can adjust to minimal but even light, and still give us a great field of view. With an optic light, your eyes have to pick the brightest point to focus on, camera’s do to, and what ends up happening is that everything outside your beam goes dark to your eyes. At close range this is no different, except arguably worse. You can only see a few square feet of your panorama at a time due to the way your eyes have to adjust to your flashlights hotspot.
Let me clean up my point real quick,
In the same way that a camera sensor can take a great picture with minimal light, mules work the exact same way for our eyes. This is why I insist that mules are technically our best sources of light. Now the extensive drawbacks of mules is where we can assist the community and continue to lead it forward.
No light maker is making this light currently. I’m not talking about a mule/thrower, just a mule “thrower”, but with a barely thrower emitter and TIR so that it blends with the mule nicely, or as close to evenly as possible. I THINK…TIR would blend better, but I could be wrong. As far as emitters, I think ideally it would be something like 519A on a VERY thin and raised outer channel. Then inside it would be something like an XHP/FC-40 or again a 519A for the bit of punch. I prefer to have the whole beam even and all high CRI, so I prefer the 519A, but if we can use a 4-die that is high CRI and throws a pinch with banging lumens that gets close-enough, then XHP or FC-40 is fine.
I would probably have trouble putting this light down. And you could say, well you can just ask Hank to make a mule out of his DM12.1, but that outer channel is already too wide because it was conceptualized with optics being installed. We don’t need to do that at all, it just needs to have enough space to sit and be wired. how thick does that have to be? And we can get a smaller TIR than the main one going around right now since we done want the best throw per se, just something that punches, but still skews to flood. So I don’t think it has to be a huge light at all. This I imagine would be feasible for something a hair smaller than what the Fireflies E12R/E12C head is.
Right now I hear the retort that companies are already producing all the bomb lights we want to build because they had the benefit of being heavily influenced by a place like this. So lets do that again. Why can’t all light makers feel like they have to start adding 4-8 tiny surface mule emitters around bezel? Anyway, I would so use this and this would not really reinvent a flashlight, it would just combine the best parts or various very useful types of flashlights. I’d say when you want to make a flood/thrower, everything has to get really big for it to get useful or “worth it”. Because you want it to throw, so you get as big a TIR as you can find, and you want a decent flood, so you HAVE to fit some optics, this balloons very quickly. The light I’m suggesting can play against those issues, we don”t want it to throw a mile, we want it to floody/throw & mule. Thats has potential to be way smaller.
And by chance, can we Double Buck? Can dual buck-drivers be installed by chance? Is that a thing?
Anyway, dumb or not, this my contribution to this undying continuous beacon of light that is BLF.
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