North Australian FISH FINDER TM forums

Just wondering if anyone has had any good experiences with hand held spot lights? What ones are the best? Needs to have adjustable beam and bright as a unicorns a-hole.

Cheers in advance

The 12V marine lightforce 240mm running a 100w xenon lamp is what I have run for almost 20 yrs and can be upgraded to 55wHID if you wanted to see a bit further . But the HID take about 15-30 sec to reach full intensity

Lats

My 2 bobs worth.

H'held spotlights are similar to vehicle/boat mounted ones.

The main considerations are light output, beam width and current drawn.

24v lights require half the current of a 12v system.

In terms of amount of light , halogen lights are ratshit (19 light lumens per watt) compared to HID and LED with about 90 lumens per watt.

HID with a big reflector will give you most lumens projected by virtue of the large reflector.

LED wont have a big reflector just a series of small ones depending on how many and what power the LEDS that make up the light actually are. The best is 10 watt LEDS as they have a larger reflector per LED.

By adjustable maybe you mean how broad the light beam becomes.

I know that Lightforce make an adjustable beam ( focus) into which can be fitted HID so maybe that's worth looking at.

I have a 70 watt HID with a fixed 300mm reflector. On the Roper I could see trees on the bank at 1 nautical mile.

Up the Phelp it was OK as the light spilling from the sides lit up the river banks anyway but a broader beam would have been better.

Time to reach full brightness isn't anything to worry about with the HID even if the waterway is busy. You're not travelling that fast for it to be critical.

Cheers guys. That's awesome information. Yeah Ronje, I was talking about adjusting the beam width to suit my needs. 90% of the time I'd rather use my night vision to travel at night but I know that's virtually impossible while travelling down Sampan with a full cloud cover. Dont really want to hit a 5m croc at speed.