once a year I email my favorite flashlight manufacturer to ask if they’ve finally made a flashlight that just turns on and off when you push the button, and every year they’re like, “no, but thanks so much for your feedback!”
be honest, have any of you ever used the flashing feature on your flashlight? did it actually come in handy? handy enough that I have to scroll past it every single time I want to turn my flashlight on or off
Rescued my daughter in the cliched flat tyre in the rain scenario, the flashing light was good to alert other drivers. I think it’s something that could be useful very rarely.
Buy one that’s made for fire fighters. They must be compliant to norms and from what I see all of them are super easy to handle. On off with a physical button.
Because it’s cheap for them to jam functionality into the circuitry and more expensive to actually add physical buttons. They want to advertise lots of features but deliver them in the cheapest way possible.
Yeah, my grandpa’s has like 3 of them for camping. They’re rechargeable and made really solid. You control the brightness by pulling on the front which slides the glass thing making it wider and darker or blinding bright but narrow.
That’s the focus your adjusting.
They put them in all the flashlights because of a combination of minimum features required and cost savings.
To keep heat at a minimum and improve power usage, LEDs benefit from being run by a driver circuit.
If you’re going to use a driver circuit you might as well allow for dimming if you’re going to allow for dimming you need to have timed button presses.
There’s only a couple of companies out there that make the circuitry that does the LED driver / lithium ion charging, so everybody just uses the same chipset.
If you want to flashlight that just turns on and off and doesn’t have a lot of features try to find one that doesn’t have lithium ion batteries. If you don’t need the lithium ion charger they’re more likely not to use one of them more extensive chipsets.
The problem is that the old multiple-choice physical switches (like the ones from 90s) got replaced by a single electronic flip-flop button (plus lots of “modernities”). These old flashlights could last for decades (especially if the user has the knowledge to repair it through simple soldering for replacement of a defective battery contact, for example).
My perfect flashlight:
- On button on side to be placed where the thumb rests
- 4 D batteries.
- Twist-ey head to change focus
- Dedicated switch(NO MORE CYCLE BUTTONS) to change mode from bright, to med, dim, and strobe
- Sturdy metal for emergency use as a hammer
- Textured rubber to feel good in the hand
4D batteries just doesn’t make sense in 2024. That was for incandescent lights, modern LEDs are brighter and use a small fraction of that power. You could still have the form factor if you really wanted a giant flashlight for self defense or something, but a pair of AA’s if you really don’t want rechargeables would be more than enough for a long life flashlight.
But any LiIon battery is going to far outperform alkaline batteries.
Can I sell you on buying a second hammer? I assume the emergency in this situation is that you have lost your first hammer.
I have a two button flashlight. One button to change settings and one to turn on and off. It has memory so it uses the last setting used that’s not strobe or the highest setting
Just
- on off switch/button
- rotate the head for bright-dim-wtf
That’s it. That’s what I want.
Thank you for copying the top comment and contributing nothing.
/syeah but rotating the head is usually focus
all these super bright LED flashlights you buy on amazon, or at the checkout counter of the hardware store, I just now realized they don’t have adjustable focus and I’ve never needed it with them.
You should look into Anduril UI flashlights. They are enthusiast grade flashlights but you have so many setting for it. It one click on one click off double click for max brightness and when the lights is on you hold the button to make it brighter and a double click and hold makes it dimmer. Also when it is on and you double click it goes into a turbo brightness which is the brightest setting.
Where can you buy them. Google search seems odd
Start here with what kind of one you like to find some options
I know reddit=evil but, r/hanklights is a good starting place for anduril lights. I’ve been EDCing the D4V2 for seferal years now and love it.
I’m too lazy to look it up but there’s a flashlight community on Lemmy. It has a bunch of the really active enthusiasts who made the old flashlight community on reddit good. Tons of guides and recommendations.
I have a Noctigon KR4 it puts out about 2000 lumens. I haven’t been in the flashlight scene for a while so only flashlight brand I can recommend is Noctigon and Sofirn. You can buy Sofirn flashlights on Amazon for fairly cheap.
The vast majority of flashlights just go to your last setting with one click, what flashlights are you using that this is an issue?
It is basically I/O limitations, and the majority of lights in this area likely have an origin in cycling lights as far as the silicon is concerned. I think that is the original high profit niche that drove a custom asic for the application of a PWM LED controller with integrated charging. Pretty much all other lights are built to a price. The chip likely has additional functionality but the actual designs are all built to a bare minimum price (or max profit margin). From this perspective, you’ll see a lot of the feature set differently. On a bike, one button is convenient as well. They usually fash too bright because of the default clock speed of the chip and a design that does not deviate from the chip’s example implementation.
Some are absurdly bad in this regard!
“Oh, you want to reduce the brightness? Scroll through 7 modes, including 4 epileptic seizure-inducing strobe modes, before you can get to low brightness mode.”
Just wait till your flashlight needs to connect to wifi via an app that you download and log in via Facebook or Google and only works if gps is enabled and it also has to have access to your contacts and it gets your first born child.
Watch this short video on your phone so that you can turn on the flashlight
Tesla flashlight?
I like using a lot of my flashlights diffrent functions at diffrent times. Although mine also has the option to turn off from whichever if you hold the power button so I don’t have to cycle through, which is nice.
Yeah, all the complicated flashlights with multiple settings I have used support turning on and off into the last used settings. I don’t think I’ve ever used a flashlight that forced you to cycle through everything. I had a bike light that did, but I got rid of it and replaced it with a flashlight mounted instead.
The maglights I have in my emergency kit only have 2 settings: On and off. It’s a switch not a button. If they ever put goofy ass strobe lights or whatever in maglights, I will stop buying them. I just need light; not an epileptic seizure.
