About LensLight: As flashlight technology has evolved, it has become easy to merely produce a "bright flashlight". The market has been flooded with cheap offshore lights of dubious quality. In addition, many lights are "assembled in the USA". This means offshore parts that are screwed together in the US. LensLight saw a void in the market for a truly high quality light entirely engineered and produced in the USA. The parent company of LensLight has been producing equipment for the motion picture industry for over 50 years. Their state of the art manufacturing facility is located in Burbank California. This enables LensLight to ensure quality over every part and process of production to ensure the highest standards of performance and quality.
About the technology: Lumen ratings are crap. There, we said it. The flashlight world has become like the audio world in the sense the specs are misleading and often times downright fabricated. Remember '1000 watt' stereos? How bright? For how long? What is the is the drop off rate as the battery voltage decreases? It is very easy to get a "wow factor" on paper with outrageous brightness claims. It is also easy to produce a light that has blinding amount of light (for a second anyway). However, the name of the game in LED lights is efficiency. Most higher end makers are using the same LED's and the same power sources (batteries). So, what makes the difference in terms of real world usability of flashlights?
1) How much of the light emitted from the LED is usable (efficiency of light)
Most flashlights have a mirrored reflector to gather the light from the LED and "push" it forward. The LensLight uses their patented technology which is a focusable aspherical lens. This lens made of high grade optical glass, actually gathers the light from the LED and focuses it (much like a magnifying glass and the sun when you burned ants as a kid). This allows for a more efficient use of the light emitted form the LED when compared to the traditional reflector. In addition, the lens system has the ability to be focused for the task at hand. Super wide flood, or a very tightly focused beam.
2) How that battery power is regulated and fed to the LED (efficiency of power)
Runtime specs also have to be taken with a grain of salt. The nature of LED's mean that a manufacturer can claim that the light has a "runtime" of as long as they want if they consider "running" emitting ANY light. In other words, real runtime is a function of how long the light is usable and actually near its peak light output. The power regulation of the LensLight is digitally controlled to ensure a much more "even" power/light output curve. Many lights with high output have a power/light output that spikes when a new set of 123 batteries are inserted and then quickly falls and dims. Again, the full story of a flashlight's performance is much more than "lumens and runtime".
Bottom Line: The high efficiency of the LensLight aspherical lens system combined with their digitally regulated power supply mean that the LensLight lights will remain brighter for a longer period then competing designs. When this technology is combined with LensLight's bombproof construction, you truly have a world class piece of equipment.
