Me too, I think setting expectations that high will lead to disappointment and complaints about initial false advertising.
Although Vinh was able to get 900kcd out of a heavily modded TM36 with XP-G2 at 5+ amps, so it’s definitely not impossible to reach 1Mcd with a reflector.
The thing is, it’s super difficult to pull off. Vinh cherry picks emitters, goes through perhaps dozens to find the one he wants to make that kind of output. It’s almost a fluke when he hits it, because it’s so difficult to do. You simply can’t mass produce that, it’s a full onslaught of custom work to tweak a light that hard.
I had my SR90 doing right at a mile at one point, wasn’t easy. When I saw the email from Thrunite on the pre-order of the TN42 I pounced (my light is Serial # 00002), never believed a factory mass produced light would make a mile throw. So the undertaking here is pretty enormous, and yes, it’ll be epic if successful and the company that builds it for us will have hit a very big milestone.
As a photographer, I fully understand the issues at hand to push light further out. It’s just not as easy as doing a little math. We’re at the ceiling of the LED’s, the final tweaking is going to be about smaller gains, baby steps, and I’m just not sure going bigger, not this little bit bigger, is going to make such a huge difference. 200mm maybe? I don’t know, which was my early question here, just what is the actual limitation of pushing the light downrange?
FWIW, 702.5Kcd equates to 1.04 miles. 1Mcd equates to 1.24 miles. While the “Million Candela” sounds truly incredible, it’s not really so much further. Two tenths of a mile, will you even be able to actually see the difference? It’ll be difficult, even with a scope…
Make no mistake, I’m not saying it won’t be impressive, because it sure as he will!
And I guess y’all already know that I have a photograph of a sheet of paper illuminated at a measured one mile from the TN42, it really does do it!
Dispersion at distance is the enemy of course. That super tight hot spot at 100M disappears way out there, so of course the tighter we can keep it, the further it’ll reach.
My wife missed focus in the picture of the spec sheet. In the big picture, my wife can be seen to the left of this sheet of paper wearing a pink top and black pants. To be able to see her black pants from a mile away in the picture, as illuminated by the flashlight, that’s just mind boggling! And we are undertaking BESTING this performance! Yeah, it’s exciting, dam* straight it is!
Sounds like it going to be a great light!!!
Yeah, that’s definitely true. Vinh only made 5 of those TM36vn lights.
The way you increase throw is by having more lumens, smaller LED, or larger reflector, or any combination of the three.
2) A smaller LED means that the rays coming from one side of the LED vs the other side of the LED form a smaller angle when hitting the reflector. Smaller incident angle = smaller reflected angle, which means the light rays are travelling more “parallel” or “collimated” when exiting the flashlight. Less beam diversion = farther throw but smaller hotspot at a far distance. Same lumens, smaller area, results in higher lux.
3) A larger reflector (with the correct proportions) should have the same effect as using a smaller LED. With a larger reflector, the focal point (where the LED is) will be farther away. This also results in a smaller incident angle, and smaller reflected angle, and less beam diversion.
4) some other small stuff like smoothness+precision of the reflector, light % transmittance of front glass, centering of LED, and tint of LED can also make the light brighter.
What I think people are having trouble understanding is that the diameter of a reflector is not the only thing that matters of a parabola.
It is the apparent area, so the area that you see when you are far from the light and looking into the front. As explained in the linked thread.
Reflectors with the same diameter but different depths will have slightly different frontal area. See here for discussion: Reflector width vs depth for throw?
In your example of the two different shaped reflectors, they would have similar throw. You are right the shallow one would collect less light and so there would be fewer lumens in the beam, but the peak intensity would be similar.
So when we reach the maximums, ie: most lumens, smallest emitter, largest reflector, then it comes down to fine tuning. Better AR coating, better reflector finishing, best possible emitter placement, maintaining the coolest emitter to keep output high, it becomes crucial to keep the small details in maximum optimization. Which is what this journey is all about really. Taking that one last parameter, the size of the reflector, to the next level…
And of course keeping the price real. 
We could just tell TexasLumens what we want and he could lay it out on his CNC machine and make it happen, if we told him price was no limit.
No, it actually would not, because of the angle of light that the reflector picks up.
In the first reflector it will pick up everything from –90 to about –70 degrees.
In the second reflector it picks up about –90 to –40 degrees.
And guess what? Closer to 0 = brighter.
In case you haven’t noticed, shallow reflectors like the first one are only used for incandescent and HMI lamps because those lamps put out full brightness in all 360 degrees.
That is NOT the case for LEDs.
If you actually read that thread you linked, you will find out the same thing, except people already drew it out so I don’t have to.
These things are all addressed in the thread by DrJones. Read it and give it a chance.
Clearly you’re the one who needs to read that thread…
Then maybe ask yourself why no LED flashlights in the world use a shallow reflector (except recoil ones).
Also, your logic is flawed because an infinite radius parabola is a flat mirror.
You’re basically telling me that a 100mm flat mirror will have the same throw as a regular 100mm reflector, which is ridiculous.
And PS. I am not saying that just making a reflector much deeper will increase throw. That is also not true.
Well the reflector area needs to reflect light from the LED. Like when you look into a reflector light and see the yellow color of the LED fill the area of the reflector. Yes, obviously a flat mirror would not do this. Sorry I am not trying to explain very thoroughly; this is why I referred you to that thread.
I’m pretty sure that’ll be as easy as pie. I mean a 1.2m wide reflector is huge!!
(Sorry had to dig that typo 
)
That’s true. So instead think about an almost perfectly flat mirror which still reflects the die of the LED. Maybe it collects the light between –89 and –90 degrees.
The whole mirror is yellow but it’s only collecting 0.001% of the light from the LED.
I think that makes it pretty clear that simply the diameter of the reflector does not tell the whole story.
There is plenty of good information in that thread you linked, I would suggest you go read it and maybe understand that there is a lot more to a reflector than just diameter.
Over the weekend I drove 24 hours out of 47. Gimme a break. 
Haha Jesus. If I drove 24 hrs in NZ, I’d be doing laps of the country
The beam profile would be different for different shaped reflectors, but the peak beam intensity is still proportional to the effective area.
My wife’s father passed away on Wednesday, actually my wife’s birthday. We drove 12 hours to her home town for the funeral, then 12 hours back. Left at 4AM Friday morning and got home at 3AM Sunday morning. A whole lot of 85mph cruising! (And I was getting PASSED! Quite a lot!)
Yeah, it’s another task to get a nice beam profile to go along with the tight hot spot. Once in a while there’s a reflector that will give a light spill with a defined hot spot and it’s truly special. Other’s can have an aura around the less defined hot spot and then more pronounced spill, this is a useful 3 way combination in a general purpose light. The softer spill is most desirable where throw is concerned to keep from being so blinding in the foreground.
Again, wrong…
Just because you can see the yellow of the LED die in the reflector does not mean that it is being useful.
As you can see from the emittance graphs from an LED, the closer you get to –90 degrees the less intense the light is.
If your reflector only picks up a few degrees of light, then it is only reflecting a small amount of photons forwards. The rest goes to spill.
All chip LEDs are like this, just go look at the cree datasheets.