LED Flashlight Review – AA Models

Years ago I posted my thought on The BEST LED Flashlights.   Unfortunately a few things have happened since publishing that post: 

1. Costco stopped carrying the Luxeon LED flashlights.
2. A couple of the Costco lights started to have intermittent problems.
3. I needed something brighter than the Dorcy AAA light, but still wanted to stick with a single or double AA design.

A few months ago I received a post on that older article from Nick at http://www.workflashlight.com.   I asked him if I could test a couple of his lights and he sent me two single AA models to try:

• 5W Super Duty 30 Lumens 1xAA Pocket LED Flashlight
• 1W 32 Lumens 1xAA LED Flashlight

Here are the two lights along side of the Dorcy AAA LED flashlight:

As you can see the beam of the 5w had a bit more of a yellow coloring while the 1w has more of a blue color similar to the Dorcy.   Both of these test lights had a much stronger and tighter beam than the Dorcy.  Pretty amazing when you consider the batteries in each are more or less the same (1.5 volts).

Next I setup my camera and each light to shine on a target picture 16 feet away.   I’ve found that while I’m outside checking on the chickens that this distance is usually the max distance of what I expect to see with a small form factor light light this.

	Here is the baseline shot of the wall and picture with the lights on.The image is cropped and zoomed to get better detail.Click any of the thumbnails to see a larger image.
	This is the 5W Super Duty 30 Lumens 1xAA Pocket LED Flashlight.Again, you can see that the color is a little bit on the yellow side, but could be considered more like “actual light” color. This light produced a good balance between the main beam with a decent amount of “side spill” for peripheral viewing.I prefer the feel of this light over the 1W below.  It seemed more solid and I liked the anti-roll notching into the body.
	This is the 1W 32 Lumens 1xAA LED Flashlight.  It has a more “blue” color and a tighter main beam with less side spill.While I preferred the feel of the 5W light above, this light fit more smoothly into my pocket.  I also liked the light color better.The tail cap button felt a little less solid on this light and the optics were loose (could have simply been this model).
	Here is the Dorcy AAA LED.  The light setting was fixed on the camera to provide for a relative display of how much light each of the flashlights produced.    The Dorcy was almost useless at this distance.

 Overall I was very pleased with the lights.   I’m not sure if it was an optical illusion produced by the different color light, but I honestly had a hard time determining which one was brighter.   After going outside in the dark and testing the lights on a plethora of different areas I decided I liked the brightness, color, and beam of the 1W 32 Lumens 1xAA LED Flashlight best.    While I like both lights, I think the 5W body with the 1W circuit / LED would be a perfect combo.

A big thanks to Nick at http://www.workflashlight.com for letting me test his lights.  Maybe someday he’ll be able to talk me into testing some of his brighter non AA based LED lights.  🙂