EverydayCommentary: A LEP EDC

Now that you can EDC a LEP torch the question is should you? After a few weeks with the County Comm Mini Cosmos I think the answer is no. If you have a security or rescue job then the answer is different. For most folks LEPs don’t really work. Here is why.

For most people a light as an EDC makes sense because it is both easy to carry and provides a broad swath of high quality light. Given a choice between throw and flood most people doing most tasks would opt for a floody light. Because even the floodiest reflector still has a hotspot you get SOME throw too. Very few illumination tasks require spotting objects more than an acre away. Given that range, only a few truly squashed optics don’t work at all. So for most tasks, something like the 47 Mini Turbo is ideal—a hotspot that can go far but a broad spill that covers a stand of trees or the side of a building with reasonable illumination.

Given this scenario the ultra tight, ultra bright LEP beam is almost a liability. Its so bright that closer than a 100 feet it is likely to blind you more than show you what you are looking for. At greater distances its not blinding, but the beam is so narrow that unless the object is quite small, you won’t be able to see all of it at once. At 500 feet the Mini Cosmos is struggling to illuminate the entire side of a car. That’s a REALLY tight beam. Given that most of the time you want to just see what’s going on, as opposed to spotlighting one thing small, the LEP doesn’t make sense as a general use light.

LEP stands for Laser Excited Phosphor, and generate light differently than an LED or incandescent bulb. File that under Today I Learned.

Read the whole thing at EverydayCommentary.com