When shopping for flashlights I consider what I am doing. IF I'm going to use the light for searching, reading distant addresses in the rain or may need to cut through smoke or fog I need power.

For emergency repairs, setting up camp at the end of a day or navigating out of a building I don't need anywhere near the power. All the fine work will be no farther away than arms length and at longer range I just need to avoid stepping into a hole or stumbling into obstacles.

Too strong a light can cause glare and it will needlessly consume more energy than necessary.

Companies sell higher power lights because it is a concept that is easy to sell. Americans are all about bigger and more powerful. A friend drives a car with something like 400 HP. He doesn't get there any faster than I do with my four-banger and he feels the pain when he fills up. I reminded him the old Willis Jeep, possibly the most well known vehicle in history, had only 50 to 60 HP.

With flashlights you pay for power with battery life. LEDs are many times more efficient than the old incandescent bulbs but they are not immune to the laws of physics.With LEDs you get more light for the power used but the batteries always have limited capacity. Lithium cells get you more power, endurance, in the same unit volume but they are not limitless.

I think LED lights are the way to go for everything but where I need a small searchlight. I keep a couple of large flashlights with xenon bulbs that really reach out handy for reading house numbers from the street on rainy nights.

For repair work a Mini-Mag with a Night-Ize LED conversion is good. A lot less light but the work is close. In some ways I like these more than the more refined and brighter Mini-Maglight LED. It is about half the cost, $9 for the Mini-Mag and $5 for the conversion kit versus $24 for the purpose built Mag unit, and the batteries seem to last longer.

Define quick. If it is draining faster than an incandescent of similiar output and size, you've either got really bad batteries or a really bad light.

How warm does it get? I'm asking becuase most electrical systems that are wasting power convert it into heat.

I use my Infinity about ten, fifteen mintutes a day, and I replace it's single AA about once every three months. The triple LED conversion for the MiniMag I use is brighter and I'm still on my first set of batteries in there after 18 months, and while it might only get used twenty minutes a month it is using a brighter LED and more of them.

+2 on the Fenix. I've had an L2D-CE for quite some time. Using the lower modes you get light for a long time. And the high mode is incredibly bright. There are even brighter models out since I bought mine. And it is nice that it uses common AA batteries of any type (rechargable, alkaline, lithium).

They aren't the build quality (or price) of a Surefire, but unless you are on the SWAT team, they will do the trick. I've dropped it in the water a couple of times and it is still going strong.

Lately I'm pretty much stopped using standard handheld flashlights in favor of using a headlamp. There are a number of fantastic AAA-powered LED headlamps out there, but the two favorites seem to be the Princeton Tec EOS and the Petzel Tikka XP (though you're not supposed to use lithiums with the Tikka XP).

I myself am delighted with my EOS, which gives out a stunning amount of light on high, but can still easily be set to low which gives sufficient light for my work area and lasts for well over 50 hours on a single set of three AAA batteries.

The ability to have both hands free while still having a light shining on your activity is fantastic - actually life-changing, plus it is easy enough to wrap the headband around the wrist and use it as a standard flashlight (with a safety lanyard built-in). Picture yourself in a life-threatening survival situation, with cold or injured hands, in the dark, and trying to hold a flashlight while trying to build a shelter or light a fire. A headlamp can make all the difference!

Ken K.