How to Choose the Right Flashlight

Effectiveness and efficiency demand selecting not only the right tool category (hammer or flashlight) but also the right details.  Readers/watchers of this blog series should now be acquainted with many of the most important aspects of tactical lighting.  Putting the various pieces together allows intelligent selection of the best tactical flashlight for a given application or mission.  The end goal is to obtain the largest area of uniform illumination for your mission range within any imposed constraints.

The first step to choosing the best tactical flashlight is identifying its specific use.

Will the flashlight be used as a handheld instrument, a weapon-mounted device, or both?  What is the farthest distance that it must provide illumination?  How important is size and weight?  How long must the device function on a set of batteries?  How will these factors likely change in the future?

The most important of all these considerations is often beam distance or range.  Our blog on Understanding Candela treats this issue in detail.  In summary, it is important to realize that a higher Candela rating (longer beam range) is not necessarily better and can in fact be quite detrimental.

What is your mission range?

A good rule of thumb is to determine your maximum mission range (how far is the most distant object to illuminate) and then look for a flashlight that is rated at approximately twice that distance.  Sadly, most users never consider mission range and subsequently end up with a flashlight completely inappropriate to their needs.

What Flashlight Design is right for you?

Once your mission distance has been determined, you will want to consider the physical design of the flashlight.  Will it be dedicated to weapon-mounted use?  Will it be used only as a handheld tool?  Or will it serve in both capacities?  If the flashlight will serve strictly on a firearm, size and weight should be minimized to the extent practical.  If it will be used exclusively in-hand, a comfortable size and shape that can easily be manipulated with gross motor skills in adverse conditions should be selected.  When pulling double-duty, all these factors should be considered.

The Trade-Off.

With the above factors considered, a trade-off between lumen-output and battery life will generally need to be chosen.  As explained in our blog on the FL1 Standard for Flashlights, manufacturer lumen-ratings can be very misleading as are runtime ratings.  Unfortunately, this makes this step exceedingly difficult for consumers.  Nonetheless, the basic principle remains that a flashlight with a higher lumen output (not lumen rating) will generally consume batteries quicker than a similar flashlight with a lower lumen output.  With the mission range identified and thus the beam distance specified, a higher lumen flashlight will generally illuminate a larger area than a lower lumen flashlight.  Thus bringing us to our goal of finding the largest area of uniform illumination for your mission range.