Everybody needs a flashlight, sometimes often enough that carrying one permanently might be considered practical. In this case, you’d want it to be as unobtrusive as possible while still bright enough to be useful. As with my previous find, the Surefire U2 Ultra, white LEDs actually allow modern flashlights to be used as photographic accessories with a beam uniform enough to be used for focusing in the dark and sometimes even powerful enough to take pictures.

As usual, I spent countless hours on the web researching the subject and, with the help of enthusiast web sites (yes, there are flashlights addicts!) found several likely candidates.

Pictured from left to right are the Lummi Wee Ti, the Inova Bolt 3Am, the Surefire Titan and the Lummi Raw Ti.

The Inova is available everywhere, takes standard AAA batteries, is very well built in rubber covered solid aluminium alloy and inexpensive at around £20. It is bright enough to find your way in the dark but weak compared to the other contenders present. It is also several times larger. It exists as a twice as powerful AA version and even brighter Lithium batteries model. It has a temporary switch at the bottom, but screws in for permanent light, an arrangement I am not fond of but which is difficult to avoid with small flashlights. I would, and will, quite happily buy a few of the 2AA models as general purpose lights.

Much more exotic is the Surefire Titan. It was built as a limited edition model in Titanium but will soon be available in Aluminium. It is quite small, and works with a single CR123 lithium battery. These batteries are readily available if you are ready to pay more than £5 a piece but you can find them for as cheap as $1 a piece if you look on the internet. Their high voltage and long life is behind these flashlights good performance. A large ring near the bezel pivots to give a unique, continuous variable light output. It is spectacular, if of little use and I seriously miss  a proper stop at the end to confirm the light is off rather than just very dim. There is nothing preventing the light from switching on in your pocket either. The original Titan cost $500, just under £400 in the UK and is, really a novelty item.

Quite a bit more interesting are the Lummi lights. Lummi is a garage industry with a devoted inventor hard at work trying to make the smallest, brightest light in the World. His mainstream product is the Raw, which takes a special, single rechargeable, lithium battery, and is made in a choice of aluminium, nickel silver, silver and titanium. I chose the Titanium model but the others perform in exactly the same way. The light is built in two solid parts which screw together, enclosing the battery, LED PCB, o-ring and glass lens. Unscrewing the light carelessly will cause all these components to fall off but this small issue also means they are all easily replaced. The RAW offers two outputs, a limited one and a full power one, obtained when the light is screwed together tightly. Having both is one of my favourite features as you can save a lot of battery power by using the high power beam only when needed. There is a selection of high and low output you can choose from when ordering and I selected 15 and 160 lumens. For those familiar with those measurements, it means the brightest output of the Raw is about 25% more powerful than that of the ten times larger Surefire U2 Ultra I reviewed recently and that’s exactly what I observed when using them side by side. Lummi suggests you can extract 10 hours of use at the lowest setting and 25 minutes at the highest. Now remember the Raw Ti is less than 50 x 17 millimetres and you’ll see it is quite remarkable. I am still not fond of the screw in switch, but the little Raw now accompanies me everywhere. As for the link with photography: you can hold the light between two fingers of your lens holding hand and use it to focus and even take pictures in the dark.

Finally, the Wee Ti is like a miniature model of the Raw Ti and comes in a choice of 25, 50 or 80 lumens output. You’ll have to choose carefully as the higher output will mean only a few minutes of life from the tiny rechargeable lithium battery. I elected to have the 25 lumens model, guaranteeing an endurance of 90 minutes. The Wee would make an excellent emergency or survival light if the battery had a guaranteed longevity. As it is, I am looking at an other Lummi model, the Raw XR-E CR2, which while slightly larger, can take CR2 batteries which have a known shelf life of more than ten years.

All Lummi lights come with a specific and very tiny charger (multi voltage but with an american plug) and can optionally be fitted with Tritium lights. Those are practical for finding the light in the dark but they can break, only last ten years and are slightly radio-active...

Prices range from £150 for the Raw Ti to £40 for the aluminium version or £35 for the Wee in Nickel Silver.

I have become very fond of the Lummi lights and suggest you have a look at their web site: http://www.lummi.co.uk.

www.surefire.com

www.inovalight.com