How Amazon is Allowing Flashlights to Get Out of Hand

Welcome back to TTC. The Phenomenon is in no way exclusive to the recent Amazon Prime Day sale from this month, but there seems to be an ever-growing amount of let's just call it unbelievable flashlights with numbers like 90, 100, 120,000 lumens in their titles. That's just $30, $40, $50 too. Some quick napkin math would infer that even with LEDs, most of these would set firewood ablaze and drain a sizable battery in a couple minutes, but these same lights also advertise figures like 6, 8, and 20 hours on high. Just these handful of lights would be over 400,000 lumens, but really the only way to get to the bottom of it is to just buy these things, lumen test them, test their lumens versus runtime, pull up the curtain on their battery size, which we did. So we bought all the most popular sort of no-name pie-in-the-sky examples on sale during Prime Day, as well as one brand you may have heard of as a control, so we're going to take a look using our very DIY light integration sphere that admittedly is a painfully obvious budget build, but we have had our results compared to and calibrated with a professional lab who does this sort of thing. Starting rather modestly in this bunch with the Rechoo S2000, a 2000 lumen rated flashlight that sold for only $15, that low price point being due to this one being powered by AA batteries, not included, the only non-rechargeable on the day, but 2000 lumens from AA batteries sounded on the optimistic side to me. And those 6 AA's are meant to power this flashlight up to 2000 lumens for 6 hours, which would be quite a feat. It looks sort of bright-ish in person, the amount in which if you handed someone one of these with fresh batteries, they probably wouldn't think twice about the light. It doesn't stand out, just seems sort of normal for a flashlight. But that's what the integrating sphere is for. After being on high for 30 seconds per the ANSI FL1 standard, it's seeing a whole 505, 503, 498, we're calling that 500 lumens, and as with most alkalines it trails off there pretty noticeably, low as 130 or so. You look at the peaks with LED lights. That's just 25% of Rechoo's advertised figure, perhaps that lower 500 level will allow this one to reach it's 6 hour runtime on high though. Time to turn things way up though with this NJ Forever, pistol-style spotlight rated for 90,000 lumens and a half kilometer of range. Up to 20 hours on high though some of it's verbiage says 8 to 12 hours. Either way, some top stuff with those specs. You'll be finding these pretty much identical unchanged from dozens of sellers and brands on Amazon seemingly all selling the same spotlight. It's got various lens colors for hosting Saturday Night Fever with your friends, party mode settings included, but it's main attraction is this high candela spotlight focused beam, good for 90,000 they say. Does it look bright in person? Well yeah, sure, but also this is a range of about 6 inches in a garage. The most noticeable thing about this one is just how shockingly lightweight it is. It's less than a pound, if you assumed this was a kid's toy just looking at it and picking it up you'd still be surprised at how light it feels. Let's see those 90,000 lumens though. Realistically we're at risk of melting our foam sphere with that type of output but I don't quite feel the heat coming off of this one just yet. So we're seeing 1405, 1415, 1410, 1403. We're gonna call that 1410. Low is 8 to 900 and its side light is roughly 160 lumen which they call out as 9,000 lumens. That means this light makes just 1.6% of its 90,000. It's side light making 160 lumens is coincidentally also about 1.7% of the 9,000 they call. This is a highly rated light promoted on Amazon on Prime Day, 1.7%. Let's move on to some flashlights, maybe this is specific to these quarter pound spotlights. This is the Alfia P70.2. It goes for about $30 and also advertises 90,000 lumens. Now anyone familiar with Cree LED chip part numbers already know the theoretical max of this thing seeing XHP70 on it but let's take a look. This is a light that's typical of the lumen range advertised using a two stack of 26650 lithium cells. No markings or capacity written on it or advertised by the brand but could fit quite a few milliamp hours with those if you need to run the eight hours on high that it advertises. This is what it looks like on in person. It doesn't quite wash out a hand put in front of it. So let's see what the sphere has to say of this 90,000. 1550, 1495, 1400. Trying that again. Yep, peaks at 1600 or so then drops quickly. We're going to call that 1500 after 30 seconds. So another one about 1.7% of its claim. Sounds like our sphere is maybe maxed out but we've tested 2100, 2200 lumen lights that are advertised at 2200. Maybe it's because the XHP70.2 from Cree has a max of 4000 lumens according to Cree to begin with. So even on paper this never had a chance to hit 90k. And that's if it was an XHP70.2 chip from Cree which it's not. It appeared to us to be an unmarked LED chip and obviously not delivering 4000 lumens like the Cree would. What's going on? How are people so easily fooled? Why are these still being sold on Amazon and promoted by Amazon? We'll touch on that after our testing coming up and I hope you'll join us for that because there are things Amazon has in place right now that could resolve a lot of this if Amazon were so inclined. Let's keep climbing up that lumen ladder and see if that pulls us out of this lump. This is the Lilting XHP90, a Cree chip model that doesn't exist yet. This is the most costly on the day at about $47 and advertises a cool 100,000 lumens. It's also rocking a double stack of 2650s but with a 10,000 mAh label on the side. We'll be sure to test that. And while it's bright it's hard to say staring at it that it isn't but also not quite bleaching the table at the moment with what should be under this one's hood. Let's take a closer peek. Of that 100,000 it looks like we're seeing 2000, 2034, 2042. I know it seems a bit silly to be getting excited of going over 2k from a group like this but it feels like a hill that we've finally crested. This one's getting a 2030 rating from us. 2.03% of its claim. That's that's really looking up. We have one last moonshot before we test these hefty runtimes. Another one from Alipha, this being the XHP160.2, yet another Cree LED chip model that doesn't quite exist yet but this time a higher numbered one. This $43 example is shorter due to taking one 5,000 mAh 26650 and while advertising 120,000 lumens its XHP70 brother from the same brand here on the left looks fairly similar in brightness. And according to the globe of truth well while this one is brighter this should be the brightest on the day and yet it's seeing 1680, 1700, 1705, 1702, 1700 lumens which means this one has some splaining to do. That's 1.4% the most optimistically sold flashlight on Prime Day in stock at the time of our purchase. So for a rule of thumb in this sky-high lumen lights category it seems to be just multiply their claims by one and a half to two percent and you get a decent picture of their capability. But what if you don't only buy the highest rated lights you've ever seen? This is the Anker Boulder LED flashlight, perhaps a brand you've heard of and yet is still very synonymous with being sold on Amazon so we feel is more comparable on equal footing with the others from today compared to brands like Surefire, Streamlight, or Nitecore. And at $30 it's also tied for being the most affordable rechargeable flashlight we're showing today. Pretty affordable. It is only 900 lumens advertised but with over 15,000 reviews is certainly one of the best selling from the brand and that brand is known to make quite a few other reputable electronics and they probably won't pop up as another company name overnight if their reviews tank. This one comes with an 18650 size cell something you're more likely to have a spare one of and it's 3300 mAh in capacity. Sure it does look less bright when compared to the last few lights but maybe not 1% as bright like the numbers would indicate. Let's see if we can get close to that 900 figure. Is our sphere just broken and only showing low numbers now? The Anker Boulder reads looking at the brief peaks here 903, 925, 908, 914, 919. We're gonna call that 913 lumens. Fairly spot on. This is why we included a control light like this one. It's easy to bag on the 1 million lumen folks but then you might just walk away assuming everything on the site is playing by the same rules. The Anker here gets a 101% rating. About right for many of the name brand lights we test on this channel who we do see representative test numbers from. These run times on high though this is the next mountain of optimistic claims for these lights. Even at these new more real life lumen levels that we've tested these lights would need some serious amp hours or some high efficiency to reach these listed hours. Let's take a look at their lumen over runtime across all the models starting with the Anker on the left here in blue, then the S2000, the 120k Alipha, the 90k Alipha, the 100,000 lumen light, and the pistol spotlight. So within the first 10 minutes or so all the lights drop out of high even if you try to force them back and it's not solely from heat as most of these lights are plenty big of an aluminum heat sink for their actual lumen output and don't really get that hot for us really. The alkaline battery S2000 sinks down to not super useful levels first as most of those types of lights do but the pistol spotlight with its 20 or 8 hours on high claim is first to go at 2 hours and 8 minutes then the 100k flashlight with its rumored 10,000 milliamp hour battery then the Anker and 120k together followed by the 90k and S2000 later with around four and a half hours. When you look at these curves basically all these lights live there beyond five to ten minute lies where most modern flashlights do of really any size in these 600 lumens and below range. One shared attribute from every one of these overly optimistic lights we've noticed is that they all show these outdoor tree line shots screen grab from YouTube videos or other action shots from other websites and on these images you can never really see the light being sold in the person's hand or even some shots like this one where it's clear the light in his hand isn't responsible for this light source. This is the quickest way in my opinion to sort out some of these lights any of these with the similar looking nature shots in the main product image if the main product image is just the product like most real brands do that's probably a good sign but more to the point of our runtime testing this six hours here becomes four and a half not bad though not super useful for much of that time this 20 hours becomes more like two hours then four and a half two and a half three and a half hours and the Anker did three and a half hours as well. Gonna save you some time looking at charging rates and capacity testing here's what those boil down to these two are the only ones who advertise battery capacities that meet what our monitors measured and this is the only light that charged over one amp two amps quick charging so all these take quite a while for their capacities though this one is supposed to be 9,000 milliamp hours and these are supposed to be around 10,000 milliamp hours and we're seeing about half of that some super cheap 26650s in these only 2400 to 2600 milliamp hours a pop all right let's drop these on the ground real quick like and wrap things up the S2000 AA light took three drops just six feet before kicking the bucket a whole 20 seconds of testing for this one the pistol spotlight did better sort of eight feet it's lightweight which should be helping it here but it's split revealing three 18650s labeled as 9,000 milliamp hours combined but measured more like three cheap 1500 milliamp hour cells there's really not much to this light both the alifa 90k and lilting 100k look quite similar and performed here similarly both 10 feet still under par for most flashlights that we test the 120k light and the anchor boulder here though are another story each fairly robust the 120k did ultimately require spiking on the ground which some lights do on this channel while the anchor died at 20 feet just before resorting to that spiking so here's how that breaks down only the alifa 120k and the boulder being a level of durability that's worth bringing anywhere with you in my opinion the 120k also had an honest single 2650 cell capacity as well if it wasn't for this it would be a straight shooter advertise this light as a 1700 lumen light that lasts three and a half to four hours and you got yourself a good deal for around 40 dollars if you have a video like ours to be telling you these facts but why don't they do this why don't they tell you how much lumens these lights make well they have these other models to compete with which this brand is also contributing to that issue a space race to the top of the lumen ladder as it were meanwhile anchor has to try and separate themselves from the spec static appearing to the casual consumer to bring just one percent of the lumens when really it's taken up in your backpack and in many cases at a better price so why does amazon just let this happen are they letting this happen yes it's pretty simple actually they want this to happen they promote these lights like on prime day more than any others as well you may be thinking what can a giant like amazon do to tame this sort of advertising it's just whack-a-mole after all this is false advertising which is something amazon's no stranger to in litigation i feel it comes down to this the fact that they already have requirements in place for products like these on the site but only ones that save them money and i'll show you to sell lights like these rechargeable you need to provide amazon with a un 38.3 battery test summary this separates amazon from shipping hazards and liability associated with that if your product is overly large or overly heavy you have to pay amazon a fee for every product they ship until you personally pay for an independent lab to certify your product as sioc approved which means it can just ship in its own container now amazon wisely advertises this as part of their consumer-friendly packaging initiative and about saving waste but it does not require you to make any changes to your packaging style merely certifies that amazon themselves don't need to use in addition to your packaging their box so this saves them money and on products that amazon has been sued over or gotten bad publicity from you need to submit a ul 1642 battery certification for battery powered products so could they require any brand selling lights to employ a independent lab to certify that specific items lumen output like we some random youtubers were able to manage ourselves absolutely but there's no upside everyone's getting a taste right now of selling these fictitious flashlights to the masses and these shady reviews appear pretty strong so there's no reason to mess with a good thing unless you want to protect your brand from becoming the next ebay or wish but that's just long-term thinking in an age where tech giants are more concerned about quarterly profits not unique to amazon of course but they could probably make the biggest dent in this sort of willful misleading product information till then i say you support brands that are playing an honest game they may not be around forever otherwise this is why ttc storefront only features products that have tested the best for us a bit of a downer this episode i know sorry for that honestly i had a bit of fun testing this batch of flashlights frankly if you know what you're getting into many of these are sort of cool chonkers of a flashlight simply wish more people had ways to know what they were getting into in the first place every friday we make episodes like these subscribe to stick around and thanks for watching