Isn’t it high time that we have some commenter-supplied lantern reviews on these here forums?
yes yes yes yes i suppose it is okay now that everybody has stopped puking mostly except for the boy who is still puking because he swallows his snot instead of blowing it out his nose into a tissue and wakes everybody up at 5am to puke up snot but yes lantern reviews he cried yes he cried yes
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"When you absolutely, positively have to clean up puke snot at 5am, accept no other illumination source. "
That would be a pretty impressive testimonial. Be well. err. Get well. All of you monkeys, get well.
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The worst is when someone wearing a white headlamp comes up and starts talking to you without tilting the light up or down. I always do a pointedly exaggerated vampire-in-daylight reaction. I figure it’s just as effective yet far more polite than “Stop shining that fucking thing in my face you dumbass!” Which is what I really mean.
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I tried that once. Turns out, achieving escape velocity is much harder than that quote implies.
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There’s a solar version of this lantern as well, and it has a diffuser around the LEDs to make the light less harsh. The black ones have no diffuser, and the bare LEDs are too bright to look at directly.
Retrofitting with red LEDs should be easy. The driver, if done well, should be constant current. The forward voltage of the red LEDs is about half the forward voltage of the white ones, so use twice in the string (the series-parallel combination has to be determined from the lantern itself, may vary by type). If they fit mechanically, a switch can be added to alter between white and red.
A good compromise is those amber LEDs. Also preserve scotopic vision and are brighter for the same energy spent, due to the eye sensitivity curve.
If I’m going to go to that much trouble, then far better to build from scratch. Consumer electronics with all its epoxies chips and surface mount components have become actively hostile to user mods, even for something as straightforward as a light. The emphasis is all about lightweight and tiny, which means the tinker has got to deal with incredibly small and fragile parts.
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In the age of 3d printers it is more than doable even with regard to the mechanical parts. Thick walls and low infill and we have pretty nice lightweight parts.
Could use a plastic jar for the transparent top, and an old CPU heatsink for mounting the LEDs.
Edit: Also, the surface-mount components aren’t that difficult to work with, at least down to the 0805 size. Below that it tends to be a bit small and requires a stereomicroscope; above that it merely benefits from one. You want one. They are cool.
Or stick a sheet of red gel inside the clear enclosure. (I’m suddenly reminded of that apocryphal story about the American space pen vs. the Soviet pencil.)
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Would work too. Disadvantages are that it is more difficult to switch on/off as it requires some sort of sliding or rolling mechanism to get into position, and that the whole green-blue wavelength span is wastefully absorbed.
Don’t cover the entire “window” with it. Leave a slit, like a hooded lantern.
Better yet, don’t buy the thing in the first place, get one that has a red mode. I can’t see a $10 lantern being worth the effort to fiddle around with.
This is spendy but there’s got to be some middle ground between $9.99 and… wow. $2403.95 at B&H:
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May be good in some scenarios, ruin the scotopic vision in others. Design it for the slitted mode as an option.
The base device cost and the worthiness of hacking it are independent variables. The cost of an off-the-shelf no-mod alternative has to be calculated with the time for finding it added to the cost itself; often (not always but very often, especially if you are an indecisive perfectionist) the modding itself takes less time than the market scouting and finding something that’s almost-but-not-entirely what we want.
Whoa?!?
For that cost one could have a dozen of such lights, and a workshop-in-a-briefcase to service them if broken.
It’s not the cost, it’s the semi-disposable quality such a cheap item is likely to have. If you’re going to go to the trouble, start with a high quality platform. You’re not on a desert island, limited to whatever flotsam washes ashore.
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True. To a degree; many of the cheap crap things have one or two weak spots that can be repaired to be stronger than before after they fail, and then last for ages.
Or they can be reengineered from scratch later once the usage patterns are established and assumptions are confirmed or disproved.
Good for when you already know what you are doing and what exactly you want. Otherwise it may be wasting money.
On one hand, yes. On the other hand, playing with accidental finds and random salvages, or the flotsam of the civilization, is also good.
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