Flashlight Reviews: Why I Don’t Do Beamshots, Common Misconceptions, and Philosophy скачать в хорошем качестве

Flashlight Reviews: Why I Don’t Do Beamshots, Common Misconceptions, and Philosophy

I've been meaning to make a video on this question for a while now, but only recently did I feel compelled to because of a comment I received on one of my videos. So why don't I do beamshots and outdoor video? The answer, simply put, is that they are inherently inaccurate. We can break this down into a few main reasons.  Foremost is the difference in the way a camera and your eye perceive light. A camera uses something called ISO which controls the camera’s sensitivity to light. ISO varies between cameras, but suffice it to say that the human eye’s ISO - if we could measure it that is - would generally be much higher. In layman’s terms, your eyes are much more sensitive to light than most cameras are. You will almost always be able to see much more in real life with a flashlight than you would in a video because of the way your eye naturally adapts and your brain makes corrections to what the eye registers.  Second, output is often exaggerated or outright made-up by manufacturers. Every year, these manufacturers pump out flashlights that are consistently just a little brighter. These minute jumps in output that are commonly measured in lumens are pretty much imperceptible in real life, though, and this is because your eyes perceive light logarithmically. From HDS Systems: “Many people are surprised to find out that going from 0.17 to 0.25 lumens looks the same as going from 167 to 250 lumens. From your eye's perspective, the step size is the same in both cases - a small but visible change. Notice that in the first case we only increased by 0.08 lumens while in the second case we increased by 83 lumens - a difference of 3 orders of magnitude.”  To add to the confusion, it's also very easy to confuse overall output for intensity. This is another reason why output in most modern flashlights are a moot measurement. We can break this down to lumens versus candela. If we have a circle filled with sand, you can think of lumens as all the sand in the circle. Candela, on the other hand, is the highest point of the sand or the peak intensity of the beam. Bearing these measurements in mind, you can see that it would be very easy for a 140 lumen flashlight, such as my HDS Executive, to keep up with or even be perceptibly brighter than my 500 lumen Surefire Fury.  What this all basically comes down to is that it takes a tremendous jump in output for your eyes to see the difference, and this difference is just as hard to capture on video. These jumps in output which are barely perceptible, though, come at the expense of efficiency and often overdriving the LED unsafely. Manufacturers effectively prey on uneducated consumers like so, who believe that “more” is better.  Finally, beamshots and outdoor video are not as helpful as you might think because of age. When I say age, I’m talking about literally how old you are. As you age, your eyes change dramatically. And like all muscles, the muscles that control how much light your eyes let in deteriorate as you grow older. An older person will require much more light to see adequately than would a younger person such as myself. As a result, anything someone sees on video, which everyone sees holistically, is not going to translate accurately on an individual basis to what they would see in real life.  Hopefully you guys can see why outdoor video and beamshots are not a very good basis for video reviews. I’ll admit that I’m considering adding them to future videos if only to sate all the beam questions I get, but I really don’t feel comfortable providing content that I know is going to lead to unrealistic expectations.