LED flashlight enthusiasm seems to be waning

hiuintahs

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Sep 12, 2006
Messages
1,840
Location
Utah
I remember the Streamlight guy at Shot Show in 2012 saying to me: "there sure are a lot of flashlight companies". That was in 2012. There are a whole lot more now!

I remember upgrading MagLites and you could buy a new 2AA Maglite for $9.00 at Walmart, a Terralux module for $15 and then a Seoul Semiconductor P4 for $10 (total of near $35) and it was all the craze. I did a custom color for each of my kids. Now the new lights would put something like that to shame and for less money too.

It seems that the first comers that provided decent lights and quality like Fenix, EagleTac, Sunwayman, Nitecore, Jetbeam, 4Sevens, others, etc.........have slowed down a bit. I'm going off of the # of new CPF threads these days on those models. There doesn't seem to be the enthusiasm. Many of the posters from years ago seem to have disappeared.

Now all I see are threads on very expensive lights and very inexpensive lights. That tells me that people are either really into custom and quality or they are interested in cheap........preferably something decent for cheap.........which seems to be the case lately. I just picked up my first Lumintop (the EDC25) for $20. I have to wait for the slow boat from China though. But worth the wait for the price. That's normally a $59 light. And a month ago I bought my first ATactical A1+ for $29.99. They also have an A1 model for $19.99. Those include rechargeable battery too. There are other models that must be pretty decent too like the Convoy which I have yet to try out.

Am I correct in saying that the whole price structure is sinking with these inexpensive contenders, and it seems to have taken market share away from the mid tier light companies based on the lack of discussion on the forum. It seems the LED craze isn't so special like it use to be in the early years. It's like a fad that has gone from something that was way cool in the beginning years to something that folks just consider as the norm today........so no need to discuss it? Perhaps this is simply the evolution of a new exciting technology that has simply matured. I see myself really winding down and unless something is on a way killer deal or some way new feature, I simply have my desires satiated for now.
 

Modernflame

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jan 27, 2017
Messages
4,383
Location
Dirty Dirty South
I couldn't say whether your post reflects the general mood, but it certainly resonates well with me. Cheap Chinese flashlights from the manufacturers you mentioned are just...boring. I'd rather save up for something higher quality and more expensive.
 

bykfixer

Flashaholic
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
20,352
Location
Dust in the Wind
Enthusiasm waning?

Well for some, sure.
Me? I missed the days when it was announced "LED's are capable of 75 lumens!!!" Then with thermal step down the lumen wars began... 100 for 8 minutes... 250 for 4 minutes...1200 for 22 seconds (yawn). Meanwhile many a heated debate has taken place about the ultimate tint. (Rolls eyes)...
But for many, yeah things are pretty interesting. A new crowd has replaced the old crowd. So the thrill of it all has been passed onto a new group whose interest is different than the old crowd. Seems the old crowd was more into the science behind it all and there were propeller hat wearers all across the board. Lot's more do-it-yourself-ers back then.

I'm kinda somewhere in the middle. Yeah I'm interested in all those new gadgets and ideas. Some from the factory and some achieved in my den/laboratory. Yet as a collector, with about a hundred years of flashlight innovations I probably won't get bored anytime soon. I geek out on how they got 'lectricity to a light bulb through a rubber tube with no wires, or the effeciency of a current circuit to achieve longer run times from available fuel sources. And stuff in between.

As newer technology allows brighter/cheaper stuff to be produced it takes some research to find the gems in a stream load of pyrite. Yet that is half the fun... at least to me anyway. CNC, 3D PDF, and spy cams help create brighter, cheaper stuff to appeal to the masses in big quantities anymore. And if there wasn't a market they'd disappear. But like with any hobby apethy sets in at some point.

I remember telling a friend/cpf'r after about a year "man I'm bored with LED lights". Soon after I set my sites on classic technology and haven't been bored since.

Like rock n roll music, a good mix of the classics with a pinch of new, a dash of recent and a splash of upcoming makes for a nice long interesting entertaining way to pass the time.
 
Last edited:

Lou Minescence

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 12, 2011
Messages
1,189
Location
New England US
There has been a paradigm shift about led flashlights here on CPF. Better in some ways and not so good in others.
Most of the weekly Surefire locked thread wars are over. They were funny but not constructive. To me it seems that about the time Nitecore exploded into a large led light manufacturer is when there was a big change. My attention to CPF started about 2008 and Im sure there were other enthusiasm changes from the early years. Its all about change.
 

richbuff

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Nov 21, 2014
Messages
2,264
Location
Prescott Az
....Now all I see are threads on very expensive lights and very inexpensive lights. That tells me that people are either really into custom and quality or they are interested in cheap........

....sinking with these inexpensive contenders, and it seems to have taken market share away from the mid tier light companies based on the lack of discussion on the forum. ... ...

I do not agree that items in a lower price tier take away market share from higher price tiers.

People spend the money on a flashlight that they want to spend on a flashlight.
Some people really like spending $5.00 on a flashlight, some people really like spending $50.00, others $500.00, others $5,000.00. The existence of a lower tier does not detract from enthusiasm from people who really like to spend higher tier bucks.

When a new exciting item comes out, there are lots of exuberant posts made in several forums, then people post less about that item as they go about enjoying the new item.
 

parnass

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Nov 11, 2005
Messages
2,576
Location
Illinois, USA
You didn't see many LED flashlights in local stores when I joined CPF in 2005. Most non-CPFers were still using incandescents.

LED lights were rare and held an allure, especially for gadget and technology fans.

LED flashlights are now inexpensive and commonplace -- everywhere from big box stores to small hardware stores and gas stations. They are no longer a "big deal."
 

TMedina

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Dec 17, 2006
Messages
1,737
The novelty of LED technology is waning - you can buy LED flashlights at the local dollar store. Recently, I bought a $4 Rayovac flashlight at a local hardware store and I was pleasantly surprised by the overall quality compared to what I remember.

That said, I think the competition is stiffer, forcing companies to play to their core strengths - and flashlight enthusiasts will follow accordingly. If you're a Surefire or Malkoff fan-person, odds are you won't be all that excited by the latest brand offering semi-exotic battery choices and a multitude of settings. And likewise, if you're enamored of what that newcomer on the block has to offer, you probably won't see the fuss, or the reason for the price tag, on a Surefire or Malkoff.

In some respects, established companies can play to their brands and not worry as much about innovative products as long as they don't stagnate, whereas newcomers have bigger hurdle: they need to produce a quality product, at a price point that will sell, and both establish and market a brand to their customer base.
 

rayman

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
May 6, 2008
Messages
1,219
Location
Germany
I could agree slightly with the threadstarters opinion. I joined CPF in 2008 when i bought my first LED flashlight and was hyped about what this small light could achieve compared to all the incandescent flashlights I had before.

In my opinion the led technology/industry did big steps back then but lately I have the impression the steps are getting smaller but there are still improvements. None the less I think there are still flashlights in every price segement available for every taste.

Oh I still remember when I build my first SSC P7 flashlight and the P7 was the most common high-power LED in flashlights ;-).
 

harro

Enlightened
Joined
Dec 5, 2009
Messages
890
Location
Northern Victoria, Australia
Development and technology has certainly plateaued to a certain extent. I am still happy to buy one or two new lights a year, not a month. BYKFixer has found a niche that appeals to him. Others, jaded by the whole thing, have drifted away. Thats how it is. Personally, i dont mind the longer wait for a light that provides that ' WOW ' factor, and in the meantime, there are some really nice alternatives out there to hold the interest. Damascus, custom, modding to name but a few.

:)
 

bykfixer

Flashaholic
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
20,352
Location
Dust in the Wind
Development and technology has certainly plateaued to a certain extent. I am still happy to buy one or two new lights a year, not a month. BYKFixer has found a niche that appeals to him. Others, jaded by the whole thing, have drifted away. Thats how it is. Personally, i dont mind the longer wait for a light that provides that ' WOW ' factor, and in the meantime, there are some really nice alternatives out there to hold the interest. Damascus, custom, modding to name but a few.

:)

It sounds like you and I are similar but in different approaches. You patiently bide your time albeit probably passing the time at other avenues like all of us hobbyists while keeping a finger on the pulse of the current state of things.
I do too. But as a time travelling collector it's fascinating to see all of the what's old is new again things developing in a modernistic approach. At least to me it is and then the newest developments often times don't seem quite as trivial.
 

Fireclaw18

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Mar 16, 2011
Messages
2,408
There has been a paradigm shift about led flashlights here on CPF. Better in some ways and not so good in others.
Most of the weekly Surefire locked thread wars are over. They were funny but not constructive. To me it seems that about the time Nitecore exploded into a large led light manufacturer is when there was a big change. My attention to CPF started about 2008 and Im sure there were other enthusiasm changes from the early years. Its all about change.
This.

I've noticed that compared to 5 years ago, CPF seems less active that it was before. It feels like there are fewer new threads and people make new posts less often. BLF now seems much more active than CPF in terms of numbers of new posts and new threads per hour. I don't think that was the case 5 years ago.

I don't think excitement and enthusiasm for LED flashlights is waning overall, but it may be waning here on CPF. Or perhaps it is the nature of the audience. CPF caters more to the high-end market. High-end products tend to come out less frequently than the more budget-oriented lights at BLF. Also BLF generates a lot of enthusiasm from its active modding community and community designed flashlight projects and group buys.

I enjoy both BLF and CPF. Both sites are valuable and are great resources to the community.
 
Last edited:

seery

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Feb 10, 2006
Messages
1,628
Location
USA
You didn't see many LED flashlights in local stores when I joined CPF in 2005. Most non-CPFers were still using incandescents.

LED lights were rare and held an allure...

LED flashlights are now inexpensive and commonplace...They are no longer a "big deal."

Very true!
 

Lynx_Arc

Flashaholic
Joined
Oct 1, 2004
Messages
11,212
Location
Tulsa,OK
I'm still enthusiastic about LEDs...... but not as much in flashlights but area lights and lanterns using SMD or COB LEDs and various sizes and battery types. I've also got into USB power banks and USB LED lighting solutions which has been more fun hooking up switches and cables and lights to light up the area around me.
 

harro

Enlightened
Joined
Dec 5, 2009
Messages
890
Location
Northern Victoria, Australia
It sounds like you and I are similar but in different approaches. You patiently bide your time albeit probably passing the time at other avenues like all of us hobbyists while keeping a finger on the pulse of the current state of things.
I do too. But as a time travelling collector it's fascinating to see all of the what's old is new again things developing in a modernistic approach. At least to me it is and then the newest developments often times don't seem quite as trivial.

10/10 :thumbsup:
 

leon2245

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Apr 4, 2008
Messages
2,335
Now all I see are threads on very expensive lights and very inexpensive lights.

Thread activity mirrors my experience, no middle ground for me. Either I'm tempted by some exotic metal beauty for no good reason, otherwise cheap flashlights have gotten too good lately for me to justify for instance middle ground SF's for workman's lights anymore, which used to be my favorite. JUst comparing improvement of quality over the last decade plus of what I could get for $20 from one brand in particular, L1P seems like it was made by a different company than E12 now. And I can make feature concessions when I spend <$20 on something, but when I get tempted by one of these jewelry boutique lights for 5x or 10x the price, they have to be perfect- and they never are, per my feature checklist.


It seems that the first comers that provided decent lights and quality like Fenix, EagleTac, Sunwayman, Nitecore, Jetbeam, 4Sevens, others, etc.........have slowed down a bit. I'm going off of the # of new CPF threads these days on those models. There doesn't seem to be the enthusiasm. Many of the posters from years ago seem to have disappeared.

Yeah that's true. I think you still get the rabid brand honks, they've just a) shifted to different brands with b) non overlapping tiers moreso now, because c) this forum's done a good job of keeping everyone relegated to their own spaces... dedicated circle-threads for certain cult brands, and all the really cheap stuff in its own subforum, where no one cares enough to hate or honk anything in particular, then with such quality reviewers here, you get definitive/comprehensive 20p threads dedicated to seemingly every model, covering all issues/updates etc. over the course of years. And historical and collectors' threads are still booming. NTm all the niche/accessory subforums.

So I still see the enthusiasm in general, not waning. No longer enthusiasm for me, just because everything's too good for so cheap now, hard to get excited about that, but I can't lie, whenever I check back in here and see the latest glamour shots of manufacturer-on-a-forum's latest projects, I do want them bad... I'm only human.
 
Last edited:

h_nu

Enlightened
Joined
Jul 18, 2004
Messages
444
Location
Virginia
Lynx_Arc could have been reading my mind as his statement exactly matches my thoughts.

I used to spend way too much on flashlights and did it for several years. I stopped hanging out here in an attempt to discipline my spending habits. I have flashlights powered by almost any cell I can find. I am even Ok with my brother having brighter and cooler flashlights than mine. Gasp!

I replaced the instrument bulbs in my antique auto with warm white LEDs that look period correct but are brighter. I replaced the amber and red marker and brake lights with colored Cree LEDs. I'll wait until I can get headlights with the right color (approximating the older halogen even though it was sealed beam in the early 60s).

I am not actively looking for something new but I am still interested. I am now happy with a few hundred lumens and look to high efficiency and interesting designs.
 

Str8stroke

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Nov 27, 2013
Messages
5,032
Location
On The Black Pearl
I wonder if Led Flashlight enthusiasm is waning or if it is just more segmented. I guess with the general public, it is doing pretty darn well. So well in fact we (or some of us) may end up being the only Incandescent hold outs soon. I also think that maybe, just maybe we have now finally all found a light or lights that fill all our needs and desires?? That is until we have a AAA size light that puts out 10,000 lumens with fully adjustable tint for 24 hours on a single cell.
 

CarpentryHero

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jul 4, 2010
Messages
3,096
Location
Edmonton
I don't know about others but for me my early years in CPF, their were what felt like huge jumps in almost every department; brightness, ui, tint, throw, beam patterns and form factors.

i took a break from buying do too a divorce, thinking I'll buy another light when they are capable of 7000 lumens for under $200. I told that every time I thought about buying a new light, to talk myself out of a light. In the last year theirs lights that have hit the market with more than double what I thought plausible.

Flashlights reach a new peek every year but it takes a 30% increase to visibly notice it to the eye without a side by side. So for me it's not that my interest has wained but after a few thousand per year I've learned what I want and what I can use.
 

idleprocess

Flashaholic
Joined
Feb 29, 2004
Messages
7,197
Location
decamped
My journey with CPF started as a professional interest 2003-2004. I was working for a manufacturer backlighting a static graphics display with failure-prone florescent lights whose heat would literally melt the solder off of other electronics in the same housing. I happened across CPF researching the then kind-of-new concept of LED backlighting. Never did implement a LED backlight for that product and left the company in late 2004, but CPF has remained.

The early days were indeed exciting as the original power LED - the Lumileds Luxeon - had been released to the world at multiple tens of dollars a pop. Previously, LED flashlights had required showerhead arrangements with their 3mm and 5mm LEDs to spit out the ~30 lumens that the Luxeon managed. Early on, you had to DIY it, haggle with a modder, or (usually) pre-order something from one of the small outfits that was messing with these exotic beasts. The pinnacle of those days for me was the Cree XR-E, which reliably put out >100 lumens on a single die without the kind of borderline-dangerous currents that Luxeons required. I still have - and marvel - at one of the short-run Alephs I bought from the 'Shoppe that's ~140 lumens on a single 123A - it's been outclassed for many years but still seems like a lot of light for something so small.

Insofar as the lack of enthusiasm, the technology adoption lifecycle is at work here, more concisely explained by the adoption curve. I started somewhere between the Innnovator and Early-Adopters phase when the technology was new and it took some effort to use it. Community knowledge was the way to go then - it was difficult-at-best to learn this stuff via more conventional sources.

I'd guesstimate that sometime in the vicinity of 2007 the early majority phase was underway. That's when you started seeing LED flashlights eating into the market share of more staid, established players. Companies like Ray-O-Vac adapted to the onslaught by releasing LED flashlights. Other companies like Maglite had to lose a lot of shelf space before being forced into innovation. Trailing this trend by about 2 years was LED lighting for general illumination (read: light bulbs). The not-so-loved CFL started migrating to the discount section of any lighting section while LED bulbs started taking over the more prime shelf space.

Seems like about 5 years ago that we entered the late majority phase. Incandescent flashlights are legitimately hard to find outside of specialty retailers and closeout shelves. I can't recall the last time I saw an incandescent mag-lite. Even the local Bass Pro Shops seems to no longer stock high-margin incandescent flashlights like the Surefire G2 / 6P.

So ... the lost off excitement seems to come with the commodotization of the technology. When you can buy it off of store shelves from every corner store, it's difficult to be as excited about the pedestrian reality of it as opposed to when it was an exotic possibility to anticipate and maybe - just maybe - experience in person someday.

Coincident with the adoption curve, the evolution of the technology seems to have reached an inflection point several years ago. First it was efficiency parity with inandescents at ~30 lumens per watt. Then it was a series of performance benchmarks - 50, 75, 100, 150, 200 lumens per watt in the lab ... all of which took some time to make it to production parts. Then it was more real-world performance benchmarks (85C binning as opposed to the laughable 35C). Then it was thermal ruggedness. But now that many of these achievements have been made in the lab and - mostly - made it to production pieces the pace of change has slowed. Theoretical maximum efficiency of any electrical lighting source is something like 300 lumens per watt; I suspect that pinnacle will never be reached outside of the lab and 250 lumens/watt wall-plug efficiency is apt to be the unicorn the industry gets close to but never realizes. More important will likely be thermal ruggedness and consistent output over a wide temperature range. And cost - always cost - since LED is still a tad more expensive than its forerunners.
 

LeanBurn

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Feb 3, 2010
Messages
1,355
Location
Alberta
Like most hobbies (for me anyway) once I have the best (EDC, hand held, headlamp, thrower, modded LED for highest CRI possible and vintage incan) for my money, I coast and enjoy them. There is nothing wrong with moderation, but I am not a die hard collector either.
 
Top