What IS a lumen, anyway?
Shopping for a flashlight can be intimidating. While looking around for the best flashlight for emergencies, camping, or hunting, you might run into words like lumen, foot-candle, and lux. These aren’t words that come up in everyday conversation, unless you happen to be a physicist. The rest of us use that ever popular-rule: More is better. It’s pretty obvious that more lumens means more light, and more light is good. While surfing around the DLK’s new selection of LED Lenser high quality flashlights, you could just use the bigger is better approach.
The savvy consumer gets the best deals, however. So, here’s a little information on lighting lingo.
When figuring out how to describe light, scientists first measure how bright the light is at the source, or radiance. We might imagine the light from one candle, a unit known as candlepower, or candela. As most of us have noticed, however, the farther away you get from a light source, the dimmer the light seems. That’s why it’s important to include a measurement of distance when describing brightness, or illuminance. So, imagine how much light one candle sheds on an object one foot away. That’s a foot-candle.
“Really? ” you’re thinking. “Foot-candle? That doesn’t even sound like a real word.” Well, just stick with me for a minute– this is one crazy vocabulary journey. The metric equivalent for a foot-candle is a lux. One lux equates to the amount of light one candle would emit from a distance of one meter. To take this one step further, a lumen is the amount of light a candle would emit on something with an area of a square foot, from one foot away. So when we talk about things in lumens, we’re really measuring how much light is spread over a certain area from a certain distance.
Ok, that was more than enough brain work for one day. Just be assured that you can find the flashlight you’re looking for with DLK. Here are some more fun facts to help you see just how powerful high performance flashlights can be.
- 100 watt lightbulb = 1750 lumens of light
- 13 watt florescent bulb = 730 lumens (8% of the power needed for a normal lightbulb to make 42% of the light)
- 16.36 watt X7 Light Cannon flashlight = 1068 lumens
Finally, keep in mind that a flashlight’s beam concentrates light to bring brighter illuminance to a smaller area– unless, that is, you choose a flashlight with a focus feature, to allow you to change the size of your flashlight’s circle of light. But we’ll cover that in more detail later. Until then, if you’d like to learn more about the science of measuring light, click here.
