Friday, February 15, 2008

Now thats a flashlight

If your wanting a brighter flashlight I have found just what you need it is called the Maxblaster. This flashlight built by Ralf Ottow a Dutch optics engineer puts out 38 million candlepower enough to light things up to 4 miles away according to this article at Popular Science. To put that in perspective your standard 100w bulb puts out 1600 lumens/12.57~127 candlepower, so the Maxblaster is 299,212 times brighter than a 100w bulb. The Maxblaster is also portable but heavy since it uses 54 batteries. You also want to have UV filtering glass or else you can get a sunburn as Ralf determined during his testing. Anyway one should be enough to light up your yard at night although if your neighbors are within a mile or four I'm sure they won't be too happy. Also I just noticed there was an update on a forum and a later version of the Maxblaster puts out 52 million candlepower or 409,448 times brighter than a 100W bulb. So I'm guessing this version should be able to light things up to 5 miles away assuming the relationship between candlepower and distance is linear. I wonder how long a set of batteries lasts.

Here are some additional pictures and lots of detailed information from Ralf over at the CandlePowerForums. If your thinking of building one yourself Ralf estimates the cost at $2000 US. Personally I would just like to see the Maxblaster in action.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's does seam very bright...

Ray said...

Wow, what do you think that would do to an ant?

Jim said...

Better watch out or the insect cruelty people will be after you.