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I need a light up keyboard like that.

Here's a picture of my Liteflux LF3XT which I usually have on me:

Same light where you can see the green tritium vial glowing in the skull's mouth and some of my other flashlights (Nitecore EX10 Cree, EX10 OSRAM Golden Dragon, D10 Cree) that I installed tritium vials in using Norland optical epoxy:

Here is the titanium Gatlight I won from Lumencraft:

Here is my Dereelight C2H. In this photo the C2H is the sole light source, meaning it is lighting up everything in the picture.

Here's my Dereelight DBS V2 which is designed to throw the beam great distances. Basically it fits in my pocket but can light things up at 800+ feet.

Here's my Nitecore Raidfire Spear. I filled in some spots around the lens with glow in the dark powder and epoxy. This was a pic before I finished cleaning up some of the stray bits of powder. After turning the light off these will glow for awhile, the green glowing the longest, followed by the blue, and then the red which doesn't glow long, but looks cool.

At 6/30/09 06:42 PM, Lotus wrote: Holy shit, those are some amazing lights, I will say!

Hmm.. How did you get into flash lights in the first place? I mean, what sparked the interest that led into you having such an amazing collection?

Well, I've always liked gadgety type stuff. Growing up we had your average house hold flashlights. Big plastic ones that ran on like 2 or 3 D batteries, or C batteries. When the batteries were fresh they were kinda bright, but quickly dimmed since they were incan bulbs that weren't very efficient and dimmed as the voltage of the batteries dropped.

When I was a teenager I got a 3 D cell Maglite at some point. Maglites are very well made, you can focus the beam, etc. Thought it was pretty cool. Years later I came across the Surefire E2e. It is a very small flashlight designed for military/tactical/police use. It runs off two CR123A batteries, which can be pricey, but it puts out double the light of the Maglite I had, in a WAY smaller package. I think the run time is like 60 minutes, but you probably only get the maximum 65 lumens for some 20 minutes. The 3D Maglite probably does 25-35 lumens when the cells are fresh, but it will dim down pretty quick.

While the Surefire was pretty cool, I wasn't really obsessed with flashlights and I didn't really go looking for more. After that LED flashlights started popping up. Those little ones you can put on your keychain in various colors. I thought they were kinda cool, had one on my keychain. Wasn't that crazy about them being red, green, blue, etc. Would rather have white, but white LED's weren't really an option then, at least not bright ones. A little later my parents got me an Inova 24/7 or whatever which has white, red, and yellow LED's with like 8 modes. Low, high, strobes, SOS, etc. I thought it was pretty cool as a gadgety stocking stuffer. Then some of the house hold flashlights started being replaced with "white" LED flashlights, but they weren't all that bright.

So one day I'm browsing some forums, probably a knife forum, and I see people raving about this new flashlight, the Fenix P1D-CE. It is advertised to put out 135 lumens on it's highest setting from a single CR123A battery for like an hour. WOW! This LED light was less than half the size of my Surefire E2e and twice as bright! So I ordered one up and when I got it I was amazed. It had low, medium, and high as well as sos and strobe modes. Pretty cool!

It was interesting to me to see how far the white LED's have advanced. They were no longer the crappy 5mm LED's we were used to seeing in those little squeeze type keychain lights. These were new high power LED's. Companies like Cree, Lumileds, Soul Semi Conductor, OSRAM, etc, are now in competition to put out the latest and greatest LED. So far Cree, a company based in North Carolina (GO USA) seems to be winning the LED race.

So I had to see what else was out there and was interested in learning about LED's and how they were quickly advancing in technology, racing to get into the home lighting market when they can get efficient enough, and most importantly, have a good color rendering index. Right now LED's don't have as high of a CRI as an incan bulb, so they won't render all colors as well as an incan bulb.

While they may not be ready for main stream home lighting, they work great for flashlight applications. They provide a lot of light with very little power consumption. They are much more efficient than incan bulbs, meaning they can put out a lot more light while using a lot less power, and they can last 50,000-100,000 hours or more! They won't burn out like an incan bulb and they are impact resistant since they are solid state.

So when I got my Fenix P1D-CE it was using the Cree XR-E P4 LED. P4 being the efficieny bin. When they make LED's they all have variations. They test each one and assign it an efficiency bin and tint bin. Right now they have gone from P4's to Q2, Q3, Q4, Q5, and now R2. Basically if you feed 350mA to a P4 LED it might give you 80-90 lumens, while an R2 will produce 115-120 lumens from the same amount of current (or something like that, I don't have the exact #'s off the top of my head).

Then they also vary in tint. Some might have a purple tint, blue, green, yellow, pink, etc. Premium bins would be tints that are close to nuetral white, like the WC tint bin, which is in the cool white tint family, meaning it's white, but cool white, kind of a blueish tint to it.

Lately they have more neutral white bins becoming available which include tint bins like 5A and 5B. These look much more warm, like an incan bulb, and are gaining in popularity, especially for out door use, but so far they only seem to achieve Q4 efficiency status, while the cool whites are up to R2. Not that big of a difference though.

Now Cree has release XP-E and XP-G LED's which are similar, but appear to be even better for flashlight applications as they produce a cleaner beam.

Right now XR-E based flashlights are outputing around 200-250 lumens depending on how hard they drive them. We may see the XP-G based flashlights outputting 300+ lumens.

There are also multi-die emitters which are basically 4 LED's in one and they are capable of 740+ lumens out the front of the flashlight.

So it is fun to watch the LED technology advance and one way to appreciate the advancements and play with them is to get flashlights that contain them.

I find myself using my flashlights all the time. Now that you can have a very bright and very small flashlight in your pocket you'll find you can use it for all kinds of things. Especially if you are outdoors at night a lot. I often take strolls in the evening with my kids and use my flashlights to light dark sidewalks and paths I come across.

A flashlight dealer I know, a really cool guy, just released his own brand of LED flashlights. He has combined a lot of popular features, and some revolutionary ones of his own, into his line of flashlights. They are actually cheap for what they are, but may seem expensive to the masses:

http://www.4sevens.com/index.php?cPath=2 97

They feature the new XP-E Cree LED which allows them to have a lot of output, a clean beam, and a lot of throw. Throw meaning you can light up things at a pretty good distance, especially for their small size. Generally you want a larger reflector for long distance illumination, but these do very well for a small pocket flashlight.

The 2xAA and CR123A models will be the brightest, but they have a nice single AA version as well. You can get more light out of the single AA model by using a 3.7v 14500 (AA) lithium ion battery, rechargable, but you would have to get that battery and a charger and learn about safely using them.

Some of his modles run 15 or 30 days (constantly) on the moon mode! Imagine if you were trapped in a building, mine, etc, and you had that on you with a fresh battery.

Yeah, the better LED's are 92, some maybe higher. I think in general the LED's in my flashlights are more in the 85 range. Once they hit 100 it's game over for incans and CFL's.

At 6/30/09 06:46 PM, ThoseSneakyFrench wrote: Have you ever considered using your flashlights to illuminate your home instead of lamps and lightbulbs?

Only when the power goes out. When the power goes out, and it's dark outside, it's party time. :P Although I don't like being without power for long as we have fish tanks, etc, that need the power to run the filters, etc. My computer stuff is on temp power back up so if the power isn't back on after 5-10 minutes I shut everything down. My networks stays on since it doesn't use much power to maintain on UPS's so I can still use Wifi on my laptop, iPhone, etc. Although the iPhone could get online with 3G, etc.

At 6/30/09 06:55 PM, SupraAddict wrote: Why this light, out of all the rest in your collection, do you usually have on you?
Is it just a great balance in durability and price, that you trust it more than your prized gatlite and deerelight C2H?

Combination of size, features, UI. UI being the user interface. There are a lot of flashlights coming out these days, especially out of China. There are a lot of Asian flashlight companies all trying to come up with better designs using the latest and greatest LED's. It's a niche market, but they are all over it. There are USA based flashlight companies as well, but they generally cost more.

The Liteflux LF3XT has a nice combination of output, beam quality, and UI. You can program it to do what you want. Basically you can tell it how many modes you want from 1 to 5. So it could just have one mode, of whatever output you want. Or you could have 2 modes, low and high, etc.

I have it set for 5 modes. Max low, low, medium, medium high, high beacon, low beacon. A single tap on the tail button turns it on. I have it set to always come on in mode 1, so it always start at the max low. This is nice because if you're in the dark and your eyes are adjusted to the dark you don't want the thing coming on real bright and hurt your eyes, ruin your night adapted eyes, etc. The min output is plenty of light to navigate around a dark room, etc. Two quick taps will bump it to the next mode. So I can double tap for a little more light, double tap for even more. If I need the full output all I have to do is press and hold the button and it will go to full output as long as I hold it down. Once I let go it returns to whatever mode I was previously in, such as max low. If I tap then press and hold I get a random strobe which can be used to disorient someone or get someone's attention, or rave.

There is another mode which lets you dim the light up and down to adjust the amount of light you want. You can also have it blink out the current battery voltage, like 3 blinks followed by 8 blinks would be 3.8v. It has circuitry to prevent rechargeable batteries from being over discharged. You can program a variety of strobes, SOS, and beacons, varying their output and frequency.

There are some things that could be better, but it's hard to find one flashlight that is perfect in every way, but so far this comes the closest for what I want. Everyone has their own preferences like anything else.

They keep refining these models so I'm sure something more attractive to me will come along. I'm trying to hold back for now and wait for a bigger leap in LED technology.

At 6/30/09 07:47 PM, SupraAddict wrote: Amen. I haven't updated my Flashlight collection in a while, I have a MAG-LITE (pictured above) that is 15 years old, yet it still works to a certain degree.

Mag-lites make great hosts for modifications. Depending on the age of your light you may or may not be able to install LED upgrades. The advantage to the big maglite is battery capacity, use as a club, and a focusable beam. Although most people would probably prefer a smaller flashlight since you can get great performance out of a small flashlight now.

Here are some of my flashlights with multi-die LED's. Basically 4 LED dies (little yellow squares) are arranged together with a single optical dome over top. Basically the dome is a lens that collects the light from the emitters and focuses it forward. The two kinds of multi-emitter LED's we see here are the Cree MC-E and the SSC P7. They both use Cree dies, but they have slightly different designs. Basically SSC buys the little yellow square dies from Cree and mounts them into their LEDs.

SSC P7 is in the middle, MC-E's on the the ends.