Last week, we showed you the most powerful commercially available LED flashlight that’s around today projecting the bat signal onto clouds. It’s the Imalent MS18, boasting a very impressive 100,000 lumens. But for the folks at Hacksmith Industries, this just wasn’t enough. So, they decided to build their own LED flashlight, which puts out a ridiculous 1,414,224 lumens. They actually have the Imalent MS18 in their video to be able to compare it side-by-side with a regular standard household flashlight you might find in a local store, as well as to their DIY monster of a light that actually melted the device designed to help them detect light output.
Your average flashlight contains maybe just a single LED module. Some more powerful ones contain maybe two to four modules. The Imalent MS18 houses (as the name suggests) a substantial eighteen LED modules. That’s what lets it reach 100,000 lumens in output. But that number (and brightness) pales in comparison to the three hundred modules that the guys placed into their LED flashlight.
Lighting up 300 LED modules all at once, especially from batteries, is no easy feat. They had to design custom electronics to hold all of the LEDs together in the right locations using 50 custom PCBs, each holding six of the modules, onto a massive metal heatsink that also acted as a backplate to arrange the PCBs. And each of those 50 PCBs also gets is own dedicated constant current DC to DC adapter, which pull their power from just six lithium ion batteries. While this type of light might not be practical for most photography and video situations. Ok, it definitely won’t be practical for most of those types of situations. But, if you ever need to light up a football field for a shoot, this would have you covered. You might blind your subjects in the process, though, and it’s not really all that portable, either. Still, what kind of photographer or filmmaker doesn’t like ridiculously over-powerful lights?
