High Lumen Flashlights
You may have noticed that many flashlight manufacturers will boast about the “high lumen” output that a flashlight can achieve. Lumen is an arrangement of brightness, and it is an alternative method for you as a consumer to judge whether the flashlight can meet your needs.
Ten years ago, a flashlight of more than 1,000 lumens was considered quite bright. Even this is still very useful (bright) output, but LED technology has been improved to 100,000 lumens. IMALENT currently has the world’s brightest flashlight MS18
What is the brightest flashlight?
Before exploring the brightest flashlight, let’s take a moment to discuss why the brightest flashlight is available. Whether you are looking at IMALENT MS18 or MS12, these follow some principles to get the most out of your device.
LED
Controlling the potential brightness of the flashlight is also most important.
The LED used. Each LED can produce the largest amount of lumens instead of separate lumens. Once that number is reached, the only way to further increase the brightness is to add more LEDs.
LED manufacturers like CREE will indicate the maximum lumens per watt an LED is capable of producing as well as the maximum watts the LED can support before risking potential damage.
Battery
The second factor that controls the brightness of a flashlight is the power provided by its battery.
Generally, the more wattage (power) that flows to an LED, the brighter it becomes. Need a brighter output? Increase strength!
As you might guess, this is one of the brightest LED flashlights powered by a lithium battery. Traditional alkaline and nickel-metal hydride battery chemistries cannot provide the wattage required in the same energy-intensive packaging.
Reflector
You might wonder if the reflector is related to the brightness of the flashlight. The short answer is: no.
The role of the reflector is to collimate (meaning “align”) the light emitted by the LED, which in turn causes the flash beam to be more or less focused.
in conclusion:
- The LED sets the maximum potential lumens of a flashlight
- After maximizing the potential of a single LED via the battery source, the only way to increase a flashlight’s brightness is to increase the number of LEDs used.
- The more watts a battery is able to supply, the brighter an individual LED will appear.
- The reflector, although it can make a flashlight beam more or less intense, does not change the brightness of a flashlight.
