I was interested in the LED flashlights and looked into them for
awhile. I found information on 2 different types of LED. The first is
the standard LED that comes in a range of sizes and is used as an
indicator in various electronics, and also used in groups in cheaper
flashlights. These things are cheap and require around 1 or 1.5V to
operate. The second type are the "high power" Luxeon LED's that are
used in the more powerful flashlights. These require upwards of 4V to
operate. Usually a flashlight will use only one of these, and they can
put out a lot of light. Recently a similar LED has come on the market,
called the Cree. The better flashlights will have electronic circuitry
that will maintain the voltage at the proper level for the LED, and
these are relatively expensive. Some flashlights do overdrive the LED's
a bit in order to get more light out of them. This shortens the life
some, but whether the life is 20,000 hours or 50,000 hours or 100,000
hours probably doesn't really matter, and even without overdriving them
the Luxeon and Cree LED's can put out a lot of light. Streamlight,
Pelican, Surefire, Inova all make good flashlights using these LED's.
Even the new maglite's with LED's are pretty good lights.
> Possibly it falls under the category of "seriously overvolt", but
> there seemto be a lot of high-power LEDs on the market with much
> shorter averagelifetimes.
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