I'm not a fan of these new high output popcan lights either, because they're not really practical. You get that 10,000 lumen burst, but then it will drop off VERY quickly. What I'd be interested in is a robust 1x26650 thrower. Vinh's U21vn opened my eyes to the practicality that even a high driven 1x26650 thrower can do in regards to perceived light output and lack of heat issues.
A huge lumen # that steps down in a couple minutes, has zero practical value. Usually you end up with a light that can really only maintain medium mode or lower for any useful time period. Unfortunately the flashlight market is like the digital camera market was 10 years ago, when all consumers looked at was the number of megapixels without understanding that more wasn't always better. Light regulation, while a great addition to flashlights is now being used to simply manipulate marketing specs. The other day I saw a series of new lights, from a well known manufacturer where the high mode runtime was listed as 90% of the medium runtime, but medium was 1/5 of the brightness of high.
As a result we now get expensive, huge lights that have a 3000+ lumen Turbo but only for a couple minutes, then step down to 1000 lumens(high) for the rest of it, and medium mode is 300 lumens or less, so you end up with huge gaps in brightness levels with actual usefulness. I would much rather see 1500 lumens for 30 minute runtime on turbo then a 1000-750 high and 300 lumen medium, 50 lumen low etc.
Thankfully some arenas have not accepted this trend of misleading marketing by gaming the ANSI spec system. I can only imagine how annoyed cyclists, caving, scuba people would be if their bike lights only stayed near the lumen rating for a few minutes before dropping to 30% of that level for the rest of the stated runtime. Seems like what ANSI really needs to do is change the spec for runtime to be 90% of original brightness, not 10% when calculating light runtimes.
