Is there anything on the market now that can get hours of solid 200ish lumen light from a battery? I’m not looking for 20,000 lumens for thirty seconds runtime, I don’t care about illuminating the surface of the moon from here, I don’t want to melt someone’s face like the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I want enough light to be able to see well for at least ten meters at night or in a lightless room, and I want it to not crush the battery so I can get as much runtime as possible, preferably automatically scaling to fit whatever’s loaded in it. I’d prefer to be feeding it 14500s, but sometimes you just gotta grab an Eneloop out of the drawer and make do. Several flashlights seem able to be dialed down to that level, but I have always wondered if a light designed to run at that power would be more efficient than one with a big pile of LEDs in it that could crank out 1,000 lumens but is being stepped down by a driver.
This is difficult because of efficacy constraints of LED tech and battery capacity.
The Nichia 519A in 4000K, paired with an extremely efficient Zebralight driver, can do 200lm for around 50min on a single 14500. With a low CRI emitter, one might get +40% efficacy, so 1h10min. So you’re looking at essentially 1 hour per cell, which makes it difficult to sustain 200lm for hours. So if you insist on sustaining 200lm, a light taking larger batteries is required.
On the bright side, you might not need 200lm to see 10m at night. With a well-focused beam 100lm is plenty.
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