Riley’s Flashlight Starters

These 3 are great affordable starters

Here is a short vid on my $.02 worth of flashlight “wisdom”.

A modern compact flashlight with a LED bulb is powerful, very durable, a potentially effective “weapon of opportunity” if needed, yet is often neglected in an Every Day Carry inventory. These 3 affordable flashlights will cover most of your portable lighting needs from general utility to portable floodlight.

These are not the final say at all on flashlights. This topic is always good for a vigorous conversation. However, these three will cover a wide variety of needs from general use to wide illumination, and tactical/self defense needs.  Even if you bought all three at once, you would not break the bank.

Streamlight ProTac 1AAA

This little guy is so convenient to carry it eliminates all of your excuses to carry an actual flashlight.  True, it’s not quite up to the eye blinking chores of the “tactical” or defensive lights, but it puts out a very decent amount of light and will certainly be useful when you are trying to find your way out of a darkened office building when the normal lights go out.

SureFire G2X Pro or G2X LE

Now we’re into some eye flinching power.  Yet, both of these are affordable, compact, and quite heavy duty.  It you could only pick one light to take with you, one of these would be fantastic.

Streamlight HL4 &
Streamlight 18650 recharging kit

This is quite the bargain considering you almost can set things on fire with it.  Just kidding, but it is really bright at 2,200 lumens of diffused light coming out of a moderately sized package.

It doesn’t have the same focused hotspot as some other lights, but that’s an attractive feature.  With the high output, this light is a handheld floodlight in a small size.  The optional 18650 recharging kit lets you reuse batteries for repeated usage while maintaining the option of using a fresh pack of CR123 batteries if the rechargeables are down.

There’s More

Of course, this is not the last word in flashlights.  We haven’t even started to talk about weapons mounted lights, head lamps, filtered lights, etc.  And what about all of the different sizes, types of batteries, form factor, price, etc.  Look for another post on other lighting categories.