How we compare flashlights

Every figure in the spec table is the manufacturer’s own published specification, measured to ANSI FL1 where the brand states it. We use manufacturer figures rather than independent measurements for one reason: consistency. Mixing a reviewer’s measured lumens for one light with a brand’s claimed lumens for another produces a comparison that looks precise and isn’t.

The tradeoff is that manufacturer figures are optimistic, and nobody audits FL1 compliance. Treat the numbers as comparable to each other rather than as measurements. Where a brand publishes beam distance but not candela, candela is derived from the FL1 definition — distance equals twice the square root of candela — rather than estimated.

No manufacturer publishes a beam angle, so we derive it. Candela is lumens per steradian at the centre of the hotspot, so dividing total lumens by candela gives the solid angle the light is spread over, and the cone angle follows from it. Every beam drawn on this site comes from that calculation applied to that light’s own two published numbers.

This is a first-order estimate and it is labelled as one everywhere it appears. Total lumens include spill, so a light with a tight hotspot and heavy spill reads slightly wider than its hotspot really is. What it is good for is comparison: checked against the catalog’s own declared types, it puts throwers at two to five degrees, tactical lights near eighteen, general EDC near twenty-seven and lanterns near sixty — which is exactly where they belong.

Right now 0 of the 133 lights here show a star rating, and that is deliberate.

A rating on a product page becomes an AggregateRating in the page’s structured data, which is a specific claim to search engines about real customer reviews. Publishing a number we cannot attribute to a named retailer would be inventing that claim, so any rating we could not source was removed rather than left in place.

Amazon’s star ratings are the obvious source and the one we cannot use: the Associates agreement forbids republishing them outside Amazon’s own API. So a rating appears only when a citable non-Amazon retailer publishes an aggregate — and for enthusiast lights sold mostly on Amazon or direct from the brand, that is rare. If a light shows no stars, it means nobody has publicly rated it at a source we could cite — not that it rated badly.

This is also why the ranked guides lead with rated lights and then fall back to output, rather than sorting everything by a rating most entries don’t have.

We do not test lights. There is no integrating sphere and no lux meter behind this site, and anyone claiming otherwise about a catalog this size is worth being sceptical of. For measured output, runtime graphs and beam shots, the independent reviewers are the right source — 1Lumen, ZeroAir and the enthusiast forums do the work properly, and the owner-insight sections here cite them directly.

Sustained output is the specification we most wish we could list for every light and can’t. Manufacturers rarely publish it, and it matters more than peak lumens for almost every real task.

Beam Picker is an Amazon Associate. 94 of the 133 lights link to Amazon, and those links earn a commission if you buy — at no extra cost to you. They are marked as affiliate links on the page and carry a rel="sponsored" attribute.

The remaining lights are sold direct or through a single enthusiast dealer — Emisar and Noctigon through Hank’s store, Zebralight from its own site, Convoy through AliExpress. Those links go to the brand’s storefront, earn nothing, and are not marked sponsored, because they are not paid placements.

What commission does not do is affect the catalog. Nothing is included, excluded, ranked or written differently because of whether it pays — which is easy to say and hard to prove, so the useful thing to know is that roughly half this catalog can’t earn anything at all and is here anyway.

Prices are hand-maintained snapshots taken when the catalog was last swept, not live figures. They drift, and sale prices in particular are never used — a discounted figure recorded as MSRP makes a light look permanently cheaper than it is. Always check the retailer before buying.

If a specification here is wrong, it is wrong because we copied it wrong or the manufacturer changed it. Both happen. The catalog carries a last-updated date so you can judge how stale it might be, and the underlying data and the scripts that maintain it are versioned rather than edited by hand.