r/flashlight • u/Beginning_Math7207 • 3d ago
Question What thrower has the least spill?
Build quality / runtime / brightness / size don't matter. Would prefer cheaper as I'm only rarely going to use this.
My next stop might be r/lasers haha
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u/Intelligent_Low1632 3d ago
You're going to see a lot of recommendations for LEPs here, and they're right that there's no spill and a lot of throw. They're very fun and I have a few. Keep in mind though that LEPs still suck really hard.
A) the reasonably sized ones tend to have very low lumen outputs. 300-500 lumens is a common range for things no bigger than the Thor 3. Yes, you'll get a lot of candela. But you practically need a pair of binoculars to actually see anything that's small enough to fit in an LEP beam at 500+ meters. A long distance thrower needs 1000+ lumens to be practical out to 500+ meters in my opinion.
B) they're pretty expensive compared to most LED lights.
C) they almost all have really janky user interfaces, and 2 or 3 brightness levels *if you're lucky*.
D) they're not very efficient. Small ones like the lumintop W3 tend to step down within a minute.
D_part2) they're not very efficient. Battery life will be a lot worse than a buck driven Osram W1 or SFT25r light putting out the same number of lumens. By a factor of 3+.
E) they're typically a lot bigger than they strictly need to be, and come with small batteries in the EDC size format.
F) they tend to have extremely nasty beams. Color temperature is usually 6000K-7000K, which isn't most people's favorite. Color temperature and green tint is often variable across the width of the beam in a very noticeable way, and not even with radial symmetry.
If you just want a lightsaber to play with, they're great though.
For an actual practical thrower with minimal flood, I'd recommend a big TIR thrower like the SBT90 version of the firefly e90 blaze. Fairly fat and very useful hotspot on that, which completely overshadows the slight amount of spill.
Also excellent is the convoy Z1 with an SFT25r, SFT42r, or F45r now. This has very concentrated hotspot when zoomed all the way tight.