Everyday Carry: So you want to carry a flashlight… You’ve considered your needs, you’ve drooled over other people’s EDCs, and you’ve been left in the dark one too many times for your liking. But after shopping around and browsing different lights, you’re suddenly bombarded with acronyms, numbers, graphs, and more numbers. You might know some of those words, like lumens or titanium, but flashlight spec pages may as well be hieroglyphics when translating numbers into the experience of using your next EDC flashlight. So, what does it all mean?
4 comments:
As a stage manager and an outdoor enthusiast, I've purchased a lot of flashlights in my lifetime. The article was incredibly comprehensive in terms of style and form of many flashlights today. Personally, when I'm looking for a flashlight to use backstage, the first thing I look for is how to turn it on. After using different varieties of illumination devices, the quicker I can pull it out of my pocket and turn it on in one fluid motion, the better. As far as rear clicky/ forward clicky goes, I'm not incredibly choosy. I'm really glad that this article talked about lumens because I feel like this is a subject that a lot of people pretend to know about, myself included. We gravitate toward getting the most lumens, but that actually shouldn't be the case. Yes, we want whatever we're pointing our flashlight at to light up, but if it too bright, then it's going to blind everyone backstage. Plus, something that bright is going to be noticeable from the audience if your masking isn't completely light proof. When I look for a new flashlight, I pay attention to the lifespan of the battery, because the minute you start complaining that your flashlight doesn't have enough lumens, that means it's probably time to change the batteries.
Personally when I’m looking at flashlights the first things I look at are how it turns on and the ergonomics of the light. I tend to not have a lot of preference when it comes to the placement of the power button. It can be on the side or the back, as long as I can reach it easily I’m happy. I get picky when it comes to the finish of the flashlight and what happens when I turn it on and off. If its one of those lights that makes me cycle through several modes to turn it off/reach the power level or color, I want then I’m going to be a lot less interested in buying it. I appreciate having all those different modes but I want to be able to turn my flashlight on to the one I want and then have it turn off when I push the button again. Especially when I’m backstage, the last thing I want is a flashlight that defaults to lighting up the area like its day time. As for the finish of the light I tend to look for ones that are either smooth finished or smooth with some kind of knurling around the front of the light, but that has just as much to do with personal preference as any kind of belief about utility.
This is a good article this week. The most useful part of this article is the explanation of LED description codes.
This is a really in depth study of flashlights. It almost feels like too much study into flashlights for any one person to think about. A comparison into the threads and how they work in the materials? That seems like a lot of thought into something that ultimately doesn’t matter. That being said, I wrote a lot about channel locks in another article, so who am I to talk?
I have a lot of feelings about every day carry gear. Personally, I like to own nice things, but they get lost and stolen far too easily.
All things considered, this is probably the most in depth and well written article on flashlights. It just seems like a lot of article.
Flashlights certainly have come a long way in the past ten years or so. No longer is a flashlight a simple bulb connected to a battery in a housing. Now there are various types of focus, LEDs, outputs, lumens, and other factors. For use in the theater, I think one that has dual outputs would be best. High output for seeing long distances, like looking up to the grid, or for being in very dark. Low output for use during run crew for things like seeing to change batteries in a microphone, or other times when you don’t want the light to be too bright or too distracting. It also seems that the price of these lights vary tremendously in price – some as low as $50, but can range into the $200 or more range. My question is that given similar specifications for flashlights, why do some cost so much more than others?
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