Olight issue

[gnappi]

I have a fishing bow with a rail mount for night fishing snake heads and Tilapia. I currently have an Olight PL-2 1200 Lumen Valkyrie on it and it looked VERY similar to the Olight Baldr at 1350 lumens with the EXACT same battery arrangement but with a green laser to try out on skittish fish. Side by side testing revealed that not only is the Baldr substantially dimmer than the Valkyrie, the Baldr has a far narrower lit field, is decidedly yellowish in color AND the Baldr does not accommodate rechargeable 16340/RCR123A cells making it an expensive light to feed with batteries.

The Baldr went back. I can only guess that nowadays the flashlight makers are playing around with the light output claims. They wrote me back and did not address the dim output compared to the claims only saying the LED color bin is different.

Real pic attached with the exact same fully charged pair of Nitecore batteries and CR123 not rechargeable in the Baldr (I swapped them several times with correct new 16340 and CR123 batteries to make sure) Valkyrie left, Baldr right.

It pays to have a light to compare against because specs can be deceiving.

 

[Bearcat1982]

I had great customer service from them from a problem I caused. Id contact them.

 

[JohnKSa]

Assuming the company is honest about their ratings and not just slapping a number on their lights, then the measurement is done with a specialized system that measures the light output. I don't know if it's calibrated to match the sensitivity weighting of the human eye, so it's possible that two lights that have different output spectra (different colors) might appear to the human eye, to be rated differently in lumen output than the machine rates them. The human eye is very senstive to green, so a light with more of a blue/white spectrum might appear significantly brighter than a light with identical lumen output but that has a spectrum that's more in the yellowish/red range of the spectrum.

Based on the tests I've seen, Olight is generally pretty good about their numbers, and there are a few other light companies that are good as well, but that's not a given, by any means.

In other words, there could be one of three things going on:

1. Because the lights are different colors the ratings could be correct but might appear to the human eye to be incorrect.
2. The one light could be defective.
3. The company could have just slapped a number on there for marketing purposes, knowing that very few people have the means to duplicate lumen measurements.

 

[gnappi]

JohnKSa, With my being an emerging conspiracy theorist I'd say all are very likely!