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A Lumen-related Question

bg Offline N_N_R

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A Lumen-related Question
on: August 18, 2012, 10:00:30 PM
I was wondering... (and as I don't konw the first thing about physics, lol).. Are 3  10-lumen flashlights equal in brightness to one 30-lumen flashlight? For some reason I guess the answer will be no, but ... no idea :think:

I think I've read that double the lumens isn't exactly double the brightness, but again, not sure...

And also... I guess 3 10-lumen flashlights won't have the ... throw & flood of one 30-lumen flashlight as may be those features are flashlight-specific?

The numbers can be different, of course, that's just the lights thta I have and therefore easier to think in terms of these numbers, lol :D


no Offline Steinar

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Re: A Lumen-related Question
Reply #1 on: August 19, 2012, 12:24:32 AM
"Depends."

If you collected all the light from those three 10 lm lights exactly in the some spot/area as the 30 lm light, the answer would be basically yes. Lumen is basically a measure of "how much light", like Ampere for electricity or cubic meters for volume, it doesn't say anything about brightness at all, if you are nitpicky. Brightness is basically how much light can you get to your eye or inside the area you light up, so that will be a combination of the focussing system and the total output of the flashlight (lm), and Candela is a better unit.

And, to move onto subjective brightness, the eye is not a linear transduser, whereas lumen is a linear unit scaling with the energy output. The eye works fine within a range where the highest working conditions has 100 000 more light than the lowest working conditions if I remember my classes correctly. So, when a human says "twice as bright", it may require more than twice as much energy to get there.

The Wikipedia article is a pretty easy read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_(unit)

Edit: I just wanted to specify, part of the huge dynamic range of the eye, is obviously the pupils ability to shield the receptors from too extreme inputs, it's not only smart signal encoding and signal transformations.
« Last Edit: August 19, 2012, 01:40:07 AM by Steinar »


bg Offline N_N_R

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Re: A Lumen-related Question
Reply #2 on: August 19, 2012, 08:11:32 AM
Steinar, thanks for the detailed explanation : ) Things are a bit clearer now :D


ca Offline Grant Lamontagne

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Re: A Lumen-related Question
Reply #3 on: August 19, 2012, 03:57:01 PM
I'm going to move this to the Flashlight section since this forum is more about questions about the site rather than flashlight questions..... which would be more likely to be answered in the Flashlight section!  :D

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bg Offline N_N_R

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Re: A Lumen-related Question
Reply #4 on: August 19, 2012, 04:04:37 PM
Okay, sorry! :facepalm: :D


 

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