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Old 04-10-10, 04:25 PM
  #6  
Giro
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Actually, both Ultrafire WF-501B & DiNotte 140 MUCH brighter than PB Superflash ...

Originally Posted by ItsJustMe
Thanks. That clearly indicates that the DX flashlight has NO advantages at all over the Dinotte, other than price. In fact it looks more in line with one of the smaller lights like a Superflash.
Actually both the Ultrafire WF-501B Philips Luxeon K2 Red LED Flashlight (Deal Extreme DX 20333) and the DiNotte 140 are much brighter than a Planet Bike Superflash. What may have happened in the OP's two photographs is they are two different exposures (f-stop and/or shutter speed). Unless you photograph both lights at once or manually set both the shutter speed and f-stop to give the same exposure, you can not compare the two photographs. I have done this in previous thread, Ultrafire WF-501 B works with flashing mode Cree XLamp dropin: Closups & beams.

In that thread's post #12 the details are:
Here is the Ultrafire WF-501B with the Cree drop-in on high vs DiNotte 140L-AA-R on high in side-by-side ceiling beamshots ... The Ultrafire's deep reflector gives a fairly narrow very bright beam with nice spill outside the central beam. The DiNotte is the opposite; it has a very shallow reflector and stepped-type lens resulting in a relatively broad even beam than is not as bright in the center. In flashlight terminology, the Ultrafire is a "thrower" while the DiNotte is "floody".

Which is better? It depends. If you want to be seen from a greater distance in back of your bicycle, for example riding at night on a relatively straight, high speed road with few intersections, I think the Ultrafire is a bit better (with the flashing/strobe Cree drop-in). On the other hand, if you are in lower speed limit residential streets with lots of intersections, the DiNotte may be better because of its wider beam. On a dollar basis, once you have invested in the 18650 batteries and a good charger, you could buy several Ultrafires and get about as wide and bright a beam as you want versus a DiNotte or two. (p.s. and have better control over where the beams go; you could have a horizontal distribution of beams that would minimize glare).

My impression is the total lumens of the two lights are roughly equal but you would need an integrating sphere to sum up all the light from all the angles to really tell.

I provide two exposures because one picture from any camera is incapable of recording the wide range of light intensity that your eyes can perceive. Even these two, one with a fourth the exposue of the other, do not represent what they look like; both beams are entirely red but the central beam is so bright that the camera sensors are saturated and record it as "white". Our eyes are capable of perceiving about 12 stops or 2^12 in a scene while a camera records about 5 to 6 stops or only 2^5 or 6. A better technique is to do high dynamic range photography ...
I overlapped the beams in the following pairs of beam shots so you can see where the brightness of one beam equals the brightness of the other. As you can see, it is not a simple relationship. The Ultrafire is brighter in the very center (so much so it saturates the camera's chip and is recorded as white, not red), then further off-axis the DiNotte is brighter, and still further off-axis the Ultrafire is brighter.
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Last edited by Giro; 04-10-10 at 09:43 PM. Reason: typo
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