This is my experience with LED flashlights over the past 20 years. The modern era of flashlights occurred with the affordable LED bulb revolution around 25 years ago. Prior to that we carried incandescent bulb flashlights which were heavy, hot, dim, and short-lived. As a scout I recall flashlight fights at night with heavy football-sized flashlights. At home we had heavy 2 or 3 D-cell battery baton flashlights by MagLite which beamed dim warm light out to very limited distances - these were good for scary halloween effects, but not so effective in real use. We used Petzl headlamps with dim incandescent bulbs when camping, then upgraded to slightly better halogen bulbs, though still dim and even hotter running. My first LED flashlight was the SureFire E1L which was priced outrageously at MSRP $225 in 2008. It was a dim 45 lumens and clunky. I will show it at the end of this vid. Mainland Chinese-made (Guangdong province) LED lights are what truly led to the revolution in flashlight technology and affordable pricing to us consumers. The top brands of Chinese lights are what I tried to purchase over the past 20 years. I avoided the overpriced American lights like SureFire, Streamlights, mostly. My favorite brands over the past 20 years have been Fenix and NightCore.
**[correction: ZebraLights are headquartered and manufactured in Taiwan, never the USA (my mistaken recollection). MagLites are also now entirely outside of the USA.]**
Here are links to some of these lights to give you an idea of what they go for in May 2024. I am not shilling any of them and I definitely don't get any reimbursement nor am I in cahoots with any merchandising entitiy.
www.nitecorestore.com/Nitecor...
www.olightstore.com/arkfeld-p...
www.rovyvon.com/collections/h...
www.rovyvon.com/products/auro...
zeroair.wordpress.com/2016/11...
flashlight.nitecore.com/produ...
www.zebralight.com/H600Fd-Mk-...
goinggear.com/products/fenix-...
www.fenixlighting.com/product...
goinggear.com/products/jetbea...
maglite.com/products/maglite-...