Incans are heading towards exctinction

[bykfixer]

Nope, they're in the eccentrics basement with all the electric model trains. I use them to the see my vhs tapes and albums.

 

[id30209]

Nope, they're in the eccentrics basement with all the electric model trains. I use them to the see my vhs tapes and albums.

I would do the same bykfixer if i had them

 

[etc]

I did. I said it. Because it was necessary. It's not fantasy, it's reality. One day you will find yourself in a life or death situation where your life hangs in the balance and the only thing between you and the abyss is that teeny tiny bulb.

I cannot say I have been in one and it pulled me out but I have been in plenty of critical situations where failure it could have made a big difference.

I mean a person who wants to climb a mountain or go down into a cave or perhaps into the sandbox and takes an old Incan light with him - in this day and age with currently available alternatives - needs to have his head checked.

We are not usually in these situations -- until we are. I mean, you cannot anticipate or predict an emergency, right? That's why it's called an emergency.
Otherwise it would be called a "scheduled outage".

The weakest link in the latter is the battery perhaps. And that can be remedied. In the former, there are multiple weakest links. The very design is designed to have a limited runtime. You are replacing either batteries or bulbs. Why do you think Surefire includes that cool bulb holder with their gear.

 

[Lumen83]

Most people are money shoppers.

They have no concept of tint or runtime of lumens, or only vaguely so.

They just want to get something that never demands bulb swap and only occasional, rare battery swap.

They know than the latest-greatest $25 Chimart item will run for 10 or 20 hours versus incans for 1.5 hours at most and get dim fast

These aren't the people who were buying high quality incan lights when high quality incan lights ruled the market. Those people were buying cheap flashlights back then too. High quality incan lights aren't going the way of the dinosaurs because the budget shoppers are buying budget LED lights. High quality incan lights went the way of the dinosaurs because the people who bought high quality incan lights started buying high quality LED lights that suited their need for high quality lights better.

 

[etc]

Most of the gents using incans are the ones using small form like A2 and those using super-ultra bulbs long or short lifetime but used primarily in microscopes, projectors etc. First group is using them cause of the size, tint and some emotions, other group because they don't care about runtime (mostly) but to have old school bright, power drain monster, same like muscle cars.

To go with the muscle car analogy - okay, will play.

These guys who race them tow them to the race track using a new toyota pickup truck and drive a Camry on a daily basis.

There has been some improvements to the incan technology lately, as much as possible, just like there has been some improvements to the carb'ed cars in the late 80's. Smart feedback carburetors with all the electronic stuff attached to them, making them even less reliable and with all the downsides of the carb.

The anti-shock bezels, various improvements to the core technology but at its core all of the issues remain unresolved since they are unresolvable.

The incans are the remaining holds out in the new world, just like you occasionally see old 70's or 60's cars - on the weekends and the drivers probably drive Priuses to work or Corollas.

I had an old school Buick converted into a muscle car. Got all the old school upgrades, was pulling between 300-400 horses. The olde station wagon was the ultimate sleeper. It would fly. It would easily keep up with the power cars of its era, 1990's. None of the ricers could keep up with it. Even up to BMW M3, though not really M5. I had low gears, headers, tuned to run only on 93 octane and a long list of things.

Even then modern muscle cars would kick its rear end out of the box, and definitively. And for a fraction of the cost and for a fraction of gas.

And the mileage was abysmal. It really overexerted itself to barely keep up with power econoboxes today. I don't know, all the various Mazda "sport" sedans.

My Roadmaster was like Surefire M6. Very fast for its day and age but non-competitive today using any parameter like purchase price, lumens, runtime and overall cost to run the damn thing per year. Unless you just like the graceful lines of the 90's Surefire M6 (and such) design as much as I do GM station wagons of same era.

At its core, it's an emotional decision.

 

[LiftdT4R]

Nope, they're in the eccentrics basement with all the electric model trains. I use them to the see my vhs tapes and albums.

I heard those incan guys still have mullets and drive Trans Ams too, lol.

Seriously though, I get a lot of requests to restore incan lights from my blog which leads me to believe there's a good bit of folks out there still using and valuing them.

At at the core most of the lights purchased are frivolous emotional purchases and that's ok so let's try not to knock someone else's hobby by saying it's irrelevant. I have plenty of expensive LED lights that I know I don't need but I'm not going to say they are useless. They're fun just like my incans!

This is a silly thread. Can we get back to discussing incans instead of discussing their relevance? The fact that this forum exists and is active proves they are relevant. /thread

 

[bykfixer]

Once upon a time humans depended on fire on a stick to provide heat to their drafty homes and light oil lamps. Marvelous inventions in their day.

In about 1900 the electric fire on a stick was invented to provide lighting to bicyclists before the automobile was more than a fad. That technology was used in life and death situations until just a few years ago. Millions and millions of soldiers, police, fire personnel, rescue workers, coal miners, and so on relied on the light bulb in life or death situations. By the 1980's companies were providing shock absorbing technologies into lighting tools. For over 100 years the light bulb was used.

At some point what seemed like a fad, the LED eventually took over the market at large. But that by no means makes the light bulb a bad idea anymore than matches used to light a charcoal grill. And to bias an older technology as useless just shows a 1 dimensional approach to life in general.

There will come a day where the combustion engine is an old technology. Same with coal powered electric plants. Will that make them useless? No. Will that make the few who prefer the combustion engine a subject of ridicule? Probably by some.

Good debate going here.

 

[archimedes]

@etc ... would you please fix your quote tags above ?

I would appreciate it if you would remove the portion where you appear to be quoting me, but inserting your own commentary.

You are welcome to use "multi-quote" tags to make the same point, in your own voice.

EDIT ... Thank you.

 

[scout24]

Somebody better tell the big online retailer. If you type "incandescent flashlight" into their search bar, it comes back with "over 1000" results. Let's face it, we're all slowly going extinct. Just because one technology has advantages doesn't mean the other suddenly doesn't work. Having advantages in certain areas? Yes. Making extinct? Hardly. I'd bet 95+ percent of flashlight use is casual, dog-walking, etc. For mission critical applications, redundancy is key. I'd say quality of your chosen platform is as important as which platform you pick. There's plenty of cheap crap on both sides of the aisle.

 

[idleprocess]

As a "LED guy" I might have indulged in some schadenfreude in the past watching incandescents disappearing from store shelves. Now I'm just slightly wistful. Incandescents may have been inefficient and permanently on the low end of the CCT spectrum but they were also mercifully simple with so little to go wrong: bulb or batteries in almost all cases.

Incandescents will be around as long as there's a market for them - something I've been saying for a while now. Surefire may no longer sell incandescent models and I doubt that the local megalomart sells bulbs anymore, but I imagine that there are still places to find bulbs - be they P60 lamps or PR based lamps. Much like how desktop computers are now out of fashion with the broader market interested in laptops and cellphones, one has to go slightly out of their way to procure them.

However, unlike desktop computer enthusiasts, the incandescent flashlight market isn't likely to merely compact down to the power user and gaming market. There is a real possibility that it will all but disappear within the next decade or two to the point that true retail specialists are the sole outlets for components and boutique producers all that remain for the lamps themselves.

Consider median incandesecent flashlight design over the past ~20 years. At one end you have $10 Ray-O-Vacs and at the other you have beasts like the Surefire M6. The overwhelming majority of production was at the Ray-O-Vac end of things but the value balance may well tilt towards the Surefire. ~10 years ago at the Ray-O-Vac end of things when LED domination was already apparent they started transitioning in a way that would be the most cost-effective for the producers: using the same basic designs and tooling with LED shoehorned in ala the LED dropin bulb, then as tooling wore out or stocks ran down they began producing purpose-built flashlights and never looked back. At the Surefire end there's more end-user investment and less producer dependence on volume, but they still move with the markets like everyone else; and while they can turn a tidy profit on replacement bulbs retailing for ~20x what the Ray-O-Vac end of the market captures there's still a point where they too may need to exit the market.

With the Ray-O-Vac end of the market seeing volumes drop to near-zero, itself supporting some of the industrial base that the Surefire end needed, it's not hard to foresee the industry winding down eventually. The Ray-O-Vac market has relatively little investment in their products; $10-$20 flashlights bought after 15 seconds of deliberation at the megalomart that need bulbs costing $1-$2 each are not something the consumer has much concern about. The Surefire market has high investment, but they're kinda-sorta indirectly subsidized by the Ray-O-Vac end of the market ... there's a period where the true incandescent fans will dig in and pay more to support their product, but it's a demographic all but guaranteed to shrink so the original producers either shut down incandescent production entirely or firesale the production lines to boutique producers to make a go of it.

I can't say that individual stockpiling of incandescent lamps is all that irrational - there may come a point where NOS (New Old Stock) is all that's available on the market in certain categories.

 

[etc]

As a "LED guy" I might have indulged in some schadenfreude in the past watching incandescents disappearing from store shelves. Now I'm just slightly wistful. Incandescents may have been inefficient and permanently on the low end of the CCT spectrum but they were also mercifully simple with so little to go wrong: bulb or batteries in almost all cases.

Incandescents will be around as long as there's a market for them - something I've been saying for a while now. Surefire may no longer sell incandescent models and I doubt that the local megalomart sells bulbs anymore, but I imagine that there are still places to find bulbs - be they P60 lamps or PR based lamps. Much like how desktop computers are now out of fashion with the broader market interested in laptops and cellphones, one has to go slightly out of their way to procure them.

However, unlike desktop computer enthusiasts, the incandescent flashlight market isn't likely to merely compact down to the power user and gaming market. There is a real possibility that it will all but disappear within the next decade or two to the point that true retail specialists are the sole outlets for components and boutique producers all that remain for the lamps themselves.

Consider median incandesecent flashlight design over the past ~20 years. At one end you have $10 Ray-O-Vacs and at the other you have beasts like the Surefire M6. The overwhelming majority of production was at the Ray-O-Vac end of things but the value balance may well tilt towards the Surefire. ~10 years ago at the Ray-O-Vac end of things when LED domination was already apparent they started transitioning in a way that would be the most cost-effective for the producers: using the same basic designs and tooling with LED shoehorned in ala the LED dropin bulb, then as tooling wore out or stocks ran down they began producing purpose-built flashlights and never looked back. At the Surefire end there's more end-user investment and less producer dependence on volume, but they still move with the markets like everyone else; and while they can turn a tidy profit on replacement bulbs retailing for ~20x what the Ray-O-Vac end of the market captures there's still a point where they too may need to exit the market.

With the Ray-O-Vac end of the market seeing volumes drop to near-zero, itself supporting some of the industrial base that the Surefire end needed, it's not hard to foresee the industry winding down eventually. The Ray-O-Vac market has relatively little investment in their products; $10-$20 flashlights bought after 15 seconds of deliberation at the megalomart that need bulbs costing $1-$2 each are not something the consumer has much concern about. The Surefire market has high investment, but they're kinda-sorta indirectly subsidized by the Ray-O-Vac end of the market ... there's a period where the true incandescent fans will dig in and pay more to support their product, but it's a demographic all but guaranteed to shrink so the original producers either shut down incandescent production entirely or firesale the production lines to boutique producers to make a go of it.

I can't say that individual stockpiling of incandescent lamps is all that irrational - there may come a point where NOS (New Old Stock) is all that's available on the market in certain categories.

Interesting analysis.

I remember a few years ago when incan bulbs were mandated to be phased out and there were long lines and people bought them by the cases. To have enough for decades. The CFL alternatives were awful. They were dimmer, the color spectrum was way off, they took time to warm up and more expensive. And if you broke them, the icing on the cake was that you had to clean all the mercury vapors out of them.
They lasted longer but not so much longer as to reimburse the higher purchase price. They had all the disadvantages but few advantages. I don't know what the advantages were. Aside from the (stated) lower consumption. They were a 4-letter word in short.

Now both are obsolete and nowhere to be found. Costco, Chimart, big box stores, etc all have just one thing in stock. Nobody in their right mind buys incan household bulbs or CFL bulbs.

Amazingly the prices have come down significantly also on the alternatives.


It's not OT in the sense that is preview of things to come for the incan industry.
Either right here, right now or just around the corner. Sorry to be Debbie the Downer.

 

[idleprocess]

Interesting analysis.

I remember a few years ago when incan bulbs were mandated to be phased out and there were long lines and people bought them by the cases. To have enough for decades. The CFL alternatives were awful. They were dimmer, the color spectrum was way off, they took time to warm up and more expensive. And if you broke them, the icing on the cake was that you had to clean all the mercury vapors out of them.
They lasted longer but not so much longer as to reimburse the higher purchase price. They had all the disadvantages but few advantages. I don't know what the advantages were. Aside from the (stated) lower consumption. They were a 4-letter word in short.

Now both are obsolete and nowhere to be found. Costco, Chimart, big box stores, etc all have just one thing in stock. Nobody in their right mind buys incan household bulbs or CFL bulbs.

Amazingly the prices have come down significantly also on the alternatives.


It's not OT in the sense that is preview of things to come for the incan industry.
Either right here, right now or just around the corner. Sorry to be Debbie the Downer.

In my experience, CFLs were pretty tolerable in their earlier iterations - lasted for many years, started up fast, and had decent color rendition. At $10 each they were good lamps; at $5 each were marginal; and at $2 they sucked. With each reduction in cost the OEMs cut something out and made them worse. They do contain mercury, but the fear of that mercury seems to be overblown - I'm not aware of any instances of poisoning traceable to CFLs; even linear tubes have a tiny fraction of the stuff that they did up until the early 80s.

I had no regrets about the CFLs I bought at ~$10 each circa 2002-2004. Most lasted 5+ years, some lasted me through 3 locations and 10 years. By any reasonable assessment of TCO I came out well ahead of incandescents.

Modern CFLs? I've down to 4: 3 candelabra base bulbs in a fixture over my stairs that I wish would die; a 4th in a drill press (had to do something with the 4th one in the pack) that's just tolerable / not used often enough to justify replacement.

Watching people gaze in frustration at the light bulb selection in the likes of Home Despot, I too am amazed that there's a market for CFLs given the visceral lip-curl I see when people look at them. Many yearn for the simplicity of incandescent where the variables were wattage, formfactor, and a few gimmick-y attempts at differentiation ala GE Reveal. LED has gained some acceptance as retail prices have dropped - with consequences similar to CFL. But the market misses incandescent with its cheap initial purchase price that's felt immediately as opposed to that silent, invisible operating cost that always dwarfs purchase price. Throw in the market's love of dimmers, occupancy sensors, and other gewgaws designed specifically to work with incandescent filaments that CFL and LED don't adapt to as gracefully alongside CFL/LED failure modes that incandescent never suffered and it's a bit more understandable. In my region air conditioning is the dominant consumer of electricity 6+ months of the year so whatever savings CFL/LED promises is difficult to see when that electrical bill comes due.

In another few years I see CFLs disappearing from the market. We'll be down to incandescents and LED. With enforcement of the previous administration's prohibition against incandescents scuttled by congress and the present administration's apparent disinterest in this flavor of regulation I expect the legal barriers to selling incandescents will be reduced (I'm simply assessing history here and have zero interest in arguing the politics). Producers may be reluctant to re-commit to incandescents however due to lack of certainty with regards to long term domestic policy and more consistent international regulatory pressure against them. Barring some of the materials-science breakthroughs we've heard rumblings about but yet to see on the market I suspect that the incandescent lamp for general illumination will shrink down to a specialty / limited-production item as the generations that grew up with / loved incandescents age out.

 

[bykfixer]

I heard those incan guys still have mullets and drive Trans Ams too, lol.

Seriously though, I get a lot of requests to restore incan lights from my blog which leads me to believe there's a good bit of folks out there still using and valuing them.

At at the core most of the lights purchased are frivolous emotional purchases and that's ok so let's try not to knock someone else's hobby by saying it's irrelevant. I have plenty of expensive LED lights that I know I don't need but I'm not going to say they are useless. They're fun just like my incans!

This is a silly thread. Can we get back to discussing incans instead of discussing their relevance? The fact that this forum exists and is active proves they are relevant. /thread

Dang right.

Well, the mullett is gone in exchange for a buzz cut and flame tatoo'd skull.
And yes the Trans Am is still running strong with a 3D Maglite rolling around the floor board.

I have neighbors who won't use LED flashlights or bulbs in their home.

My home has all kinds of CFL bulbs. Some pretty good. Others make the area a ghastly grey/blue. Yet they haven't stopped working so they're staying. Most go back to the $10 each days.
I have krypton bulbs that lasted longer than the 4 for $10 CFL's. One krypton for a table lamp is pushing 7 years now.

 

[KITROBASKIN]

So much of this discussion could easily replace the word 'incandescents' with 'vinyl records' and we could party like it's 1999.
At my mother's estate sale, the vinyl records went, that's for sure.
My 8 year old son has a friend whose older siblings like to play vintage video games!

 

[archimedes]

:rock: ... Is anyone making brand new vacuum tubes for amps, or is that all gone now too ...

 

[scout24]

Arch- What comes around, goes around. What's old is new again. Pick your adage. I received a user E1e from the 'Bay this afternoon that's in my pocket right now. Popped a LF HO-E1R in there with an Efest IMR 16340. Rockin' the single output, inefficient battery killer to walk the pups tonight. I will have a black BOSS 70 in my back pocket though, just in case... Don't worry, there will be a niche market for tubes, and somebody will produce them. Right now, we have Lumensfactory, Tad's customs, and who else producing incan bulbs to keep the classic Surefire's going?

Nevermind factory support for Mags, Streamlight, Rayovac, etc...

 

[archimedes]

... two outta three ain't bad :devil:

 

[etc]

In my experience, CFLs were pretty tolerable in their earlier iterations - lasted for many years, started up fast, and had decent color rendition. At $10 each they were good lamps; at $5 each were marginal; and at $2 they sucked. With each reduction in cost the OEMs cut something out and made them worse. They do contain mercury, but the fear of that mercury seems to be overblown - I'm not aware of any instances of poisoning traceable to CFLs; even linear tubes have a tiny fraction of the stuff that they did up until the early 80s.

I had no regrets about the CFLs I bought at ~$10 each circa 2002-2004. Most lasted 5+ years, some lasted me through 3 locations and 10 years. By any reasonable assessment of TCO I came out well ahead of incandescents.

Modern CFLs? I've down to 4: 3 candelabra base bulbs in a fixture over my stairs that I wish would die; a 4th in a drill press (had to do something with the 4th one in the pack) that's just tolerable / not used often enough to justify replacement.

Watching people gaze in frustration at the light bulb selection in the likes of Home Despot, I too am amazed that there's a market for CFLs given the visceral lip-curl I see when people look at them. Many yearn for the simplicity of incandescent where the variables were wattage, formfactor, and a few gimmick-y attempts at differentiation ala GE Reveal. LED has gained some acceptance as retail prices have dropped - with consequences similar to CFL. But the market misses incandescent with its cheap initial purchase price that's felt immediately as opposed to that silent, invisible operating cost that always dwarfs purchase price. Throw in the market's love of dimmers, occupancy sensors, and other gewgaws designed specifically to work with incandescent filaments that CFL and LED don't adapt to as gracefully alongside CFL/LED failure modes that incandescent never suffered and it's a bit more understandable. In my region air conditioning is the dominant consumer of electricity 6+ months of the year so whatever savings CFL/LED promises is difficult to see when that electrical bill comes due.

In another few years I see CFLs disappearing from the market. We'll be down to incandescents and LED. With enforcement of the previous administration's prohibition against incandescents scuttled by congress and the present administration's apparent disinterest in this flavor of regulation I expect the legal barriers to selling incandescents will be reduced (I'm simply assessing history here and have zero interest in arguing the politics). Producers may be reluctant to re-commit to incandescents however due to lack of certainty with regards to long term domestic policy and more consistent international regulatory pressure against them. Barring some of the materials-science breakthroughs we've heard rumblings about but yet to see on the market I suspect that the incandescent lamp for general illumination will shrink down to a specialty / limited-production item as the generations that grew up with / loved incandescents age out.

I haven't seen any CFLs for sale in a while. Maybe it's the regional market in the area I am at (the most expensive area in the country, one of). The local Home Depot, Costco, etc. has all the shelves full of you-know-what. No CFLs.

I think CFLs failed on many levels, one of the not so obvious ones, initially was the slow speed at which they gained full lumens. This became especially relevant with motion sensor flood lights. The LED technology turns on much faster than CFLs and somewhat faster than incans. It's on, right there at full lumens and instantly so. This may be critical in some applications.

Maybe I got the wrong brands but I've never had luck with the CFLs. They never got me the promises runtime. Always burning out way before and seemingly not that longer than incans. I don't remember the brand or price point anymore but overall I was not impressed and of course I did break one once upon a time.

Both incan and CFL are dead technologies. Too expensive and complicated. By expensive I mean not the purchase price but the cost of lifetime ownership. Not just buying replacements but in some cases you have to pay someone to replace the silly thing that burned out once again. Burned out headlights, tail-lights, lights in the celiing that are hard to reach, etc. On some cars, you have to remove the bumper to swap the headlight.
Incan as a whole is a minor nightmare. It was a miracle in the year 1900 but we are not in 1900 anymore when the alternative was the dim, smoking and dangerous kerosine lamp or candles in the year 1700.

Let this be a lesson, the CFL trend is the preview of where incans are headed. CFL is already unobtanium in my area. Soon to be so everywhere. Or already there if you use surefire dot com as the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

 

[etc]

Arch- What comes around, goes around. What's old is new again. Pick your adage. I received a user E1e from the 'Bay this afternoon that's in my pocket right now. Popped a LF HO-E1R in there with an Efest IMR 16340. Rockin' the single output, inefficient battery killer to walk the pups tonight. I will have a black BOSS 70 in my back pocket though, just in case... Don't worry, there will be a niche market for tubes, and somebody will produce them. Right now, we have Lumensfactory, Tad's customs, and who else producing incan bulbs to keep the classic Surefire's going?

Nevermind factory support for Mags, Streamlight, Rayovac, etc...

support of what, exactly?

2D Maglite the incan version generates 27 lumens.

The MAGLITE ML25LT LED 2C model generates 177, has better runtime and the "bulb" never burns out. We are talking about lumens being an order of magnitude higher as well as other parameters.

Oh the icing on the cake is the price is lower for the ML25LT at least for me, the Amazon price version.

 

[bykfixer]

Dude! Stop! Please. :candle: