Originally Posted by Merriwether
The older, 20mAh LEDs
You can't even get simple physical units right?
Ah. So, after all this, it turns out you don't actually have an opinion about what I'm saying in this thread: that halogen are more efficient in producing lumens/watt than LED.
The part of your original post that I objected to was the statement that LEDs were all-around
"worse" headlights, based on one factor alone: "lumens/watt". I've been countering that there are
other important factors to consider, and that "lumens/watt" is only one consideration among many.
If you were simply stating some credible lumen/watt figures for comparable power we'd have no
reason to argue. However, you went farther than that.
OK, the link says that the "1 Watt" (more like 1.2 Watt in reality) Luxeon is 30 lumens, giving
25 lumens/watt. I spent a few minutes trying to find lumens/watt figures for "1 Watt" halogens.
(Hopefully 1.2 Watt to be accurate.) So far I've only found numbers for bulbs of much higher wattage.
The closest I've come is a whopping 6 Watt halogen producing 13.3 lumens/watt in the link
somewhere above. (Somehow I'm unimpressed) Without a credible lumens/watt number for a
1.2 Watt halogen, it's still apples and oranges. One of the flashlight-geek sites might have
something useful...
And it's not exactly true that you want a "1 watt light", is it? What it seems you want is a light with a very long run time, which is why you're happy with your LED during all of its battery life, even during that period when it's running at less than 1watt. (Even when it's at "half the brightness", you said.)
Dunno, I've never seen it go that dim because it takes too long to run the batteries down that far.
(NiMHs are expensive so I wouldn't want to abuse them in that way anyway, except for an emergency)
However, my previous bike light (Black Diamond Moonlight) was about 1/5 the brightness of the
EL500 and I rode happily with that for a year, no problem, which is why I said half the brightness
was fine. I got the EL500 when I started riding a road bike because it flashes off bits of road glass
better, which never concerned me on the mountain bike knobbies, & I figured it would be a great
camping/emergency light, too.