Eesh, sorry about that title. I may have just made up a word. Or two. Whatever.
The point is, this is the light I use when practicing my paramagic (OK, three words. Fite me).
This is the Lumintop IYP 365 light [linky linky, help me help you] – I don’t believe they offered a single AAA version when I bought mine, but it appears they do now, the IYP 07, if you prefer a shorter light.
(Honestly, when I'm at work, the length of the light isn't a huge concern, but I'm also wearing cargo pants [all the pockets!] which prevents me from worrying about real estate too much. If you're looking for one of these as an every day sort of light, you might prefer the 07.)
At any rate, the reason I carry this and not my Streamlight at work is simple – as I mentioned in that post, the Streamlight has a slight bluish cast to its light, and in the world of EMS, it can be very worthwhile to know if your patient has a bluish cast of their own, or if it’s just your LED flashlight.
For those of you in EMS, or for applications like game tracking and plant identification (or whatever it is you do that’s color sensitive), one of these lights may be a better choice than the Streamlight in my previous post.
This light has 3 modes, (low, medium and … wait for it… high!) and it starts in low – useful for checking people’s pupils without blinding them (primum non nocere and all that), another useful feature for the emergentologists in the crowd (yes, five is a crowd).
WARNING: nerd stuff ahead. Heere be dragonnes and whatnot.
For those of you curious about why this light is less blue than other LED lights, how that “less-blueness” is quantified, and why you should care, allow me to introduce the concept of CRI – Color Rendering Index.
In basic terms, CRI is just a quantification of how well the light source replicates natural light – whether that’s sunlight or halogen or incandescent (all of which count as “natural”) depends on the color temperature of the “artificial” (usually LED nowadays) light being tested.
If you want to learn more about CRI specifics, or just feel like following an interesting rabbit hole, go check out Waveform Lighting’s excellent explanation of CRI. For the purposes of this post, just know the CRI of these Lumintop lights are much better than the Streamlight I profiled earlier, which can come in handy for some uses.
Pros
- High CRI
- Common batteries
- Useful modes for medical types
- Bright enough for most uses
Cons
- Not as bright as some lights of similar size
- Does not necessarily use rechargeable batteries
- Larger profile (for the 365)
Alright, I think that’s enough for this one – feel free to shoot questions or comments my way, or if you have a specific product you’d like to see me review, let me know – just visit the Contact page here.
-T