What do you mean by an encoder?
From what I can tell more area of Light Emitting Surface is way to get more performance as the days of waiting for a significantly brighter bin to be released (eg. from P4 to Q5) might be over. So I’m expecting crazy amounts of emitters in 2021 (eg. Astrolux FT04S and EC03). I suspect cool white SST40s and XHP50.2s will still be leading the charge, and 6V XHP70.2s of varying tints will still be a mainstay. Samsung’s LEDs will continue to slowly become more available.
Might be stating the obvious but will post anyway.
THIS!!
A few things I’m hoping for in 2021 that I think are somewhat realistic :
- More lights that support charging with a USB-C to USC-C cable
- Lights that support USB Power Delivery charging
- Manufacturers shipping lights with Anduril 2
- More lights with pogo pins for flashing
- A common standard for pogo pin flashing
- Lights running the 1-series MCU, for all the reasons mentioned by TomE
The thing I’m most looking forward to is seeing what BLF members come up with. The people contribute to open source hardware and firmware, work with manufactures to make new BLF designs and special additions available, the modders and makers who share their creations, and the people who share their knowledge to help others are what really make the flashlight hobby fun for me.
I would add, that both SST-20 and SST-40 should exist in 95CRI for 4500K, 5000K, 5700K as well.
Based on a talk with an insider person, BlueSwordM mentioned, that we will maybe expect some expansion, but that was quite a bit some time before, so I would greatly appreciate, if that would eventually happen soon from now.
I’d like some more 14500 lights on the market. Currently this niche seems widely neglected by manufacturers, and with the recent addition of new 1000mAh cells with high discharge rate, it seems like there are some new, unexplored possibilities.
An Olight Warrior Mini variation with 14500 (Warrior Micro?) and slightly toned down output, comparable to S1R II, plus a choice of non-green-tint emitter, sounds very good to me.
I hope to hear more news on Manker’s new electronic zoomie based on liquid crystal lens
+1 on this too! Lately, I really like EDC'ing the ThruNite T10TV2 CutleryLover with a 14500. It's almost perfect - compact size, takes abuse (titanium), nice pocket clip, looks great, decent tint w/NW XP-L (ok but should swap to something warmer, high CRI), pretty decent power.
I think some new ways of collecting and dispersing heat is the main item to be dealt with now. Leds and drivers have already out-paced this problem. One problem is to remove the heat without using the flashlight body. I hope to contribute something to this problem soon. 
But this is an unproven attempt we will see soon.
Sounds amazing! Where did you hear about that?
High Cri 9080 Leds XM and XP size < 2700k
2021 Flashlight should be more super efficient compare to its predecessor which mean vary from :
- Efficient driver
- efficient thermal regulation
- efficient new led
- conservative and super energy save but yet powerful
probably there more, I’m based my guessing around of what we have had present flashlight…
Sweet! Do you have the 2000K KR4? It’s my favorite light
That new Noctigon looks good, like a 2020 upgrade of my treasured Old Lumens build.
I'm still wanting an Anduril driver that produces thunder audio in lightning mode. I've built the subwoofers for it!
Technically there is away to cool LED’s without directly just transferring it to the flashlight body but it would still have a thermal limit, If we used a peltier cooling pad and had that between the MCPCB and the flashlight body we could cool it dramatically but at the cost of power and a hotter flashlight body.
The peltier cooling pad essentially draws heat from one side and expelling on the other side and can get cold enough to freeze water that touches the surface.
I wonder if you could use thermoelectric cooling to drain the heat from the LEDs and pump the energy back into the battery cells
Wouldn’t that just cause the cells to explode ? with current draw the cells would be heating up due to thermal resistance from discharging same thing happens when charging a cell so if we could convert the heat energy back into the cells that would be dangerous…
Well, thermodynamics says that you can’t cool an object to absolute zero by extracting the energy and using it. That’s why it takes energy to cool the air in your house when it’s 100 degrees in the summer.
But that always seemed counterintuitive to me. Zero point energy? (: