I recently came across some of the pictures that I used in early my watsonseblog, sometime around the mid 2000s. From 2000 when white LEDs were very expensive and difficult to obtain, the LED flashlights (torches) were very expensive. Generally, a LED flashlight with a few 5mm white LEDs would cost several tens of dollars U.S. One that threw a decent beam might cost 80, 100 or more dollars U.S. The manufacturers – I remember Lumileds was one of the first – started developing white LEDs that were larger than 5mm, with power up to 1 watt.
Jump ahead a decade and we can find flashlights with 9 white LEDs on the store shelf for 4, 3, or even 2 dollars, Ten years earlier, just a single one of those LEDs would have cost that much. The prices have come down a lot and the light output has increased dramatically.
One other phenomenon has come about i that time. The overseas companies, especially China and Hing Cong have been making flashlights out of solid aluminum that are inexpensive, put out a lot of light, and use only a single AA or AAA cell, so the cost of operation is low. One would think that it would be very hard to compete with this winning combination.
But the cheap 9 LED lights I see on the store shelf don’t have that one advantage; they use three AAA cells so the cost of replacing the three could be two dollars, more than half the cost of the flashlight.
