Cost, obsolescence, and how much 'better' can lights get ?

[kelemvor]

There are plenty of vastly more powerful LED chips on the market compared to what is currently being offered in dive lights. I've got a 10,000 lumen chip (100 watt) in a DIY can light. Converted from an old HID can light. 18650's that can sustain 10a are reasonably priced from Sanyo. Three of those cells in series will power that 10,000 lumen chip. 3 of those "packs" in parallel (aka 3s3p) will give you a reasonable runtime.

What you aren't going to have is tiny handheld lights with one cell that produces tons of light. In order to do it, you've got to go back to canister lights.

If you wanted to risk lipos, I have a 10,000mah lipo pack that will produce 250A of current for my drone. I wouldn't take a lipo underwater though.

In caves, I found that my 1000 lumen light was too powerful. My dive-rite "backup" lights (bk1 or bx1, can't remember) were just right. Everyone in your team should have similarly powered lights or it gets real annoying real quick when the bright guy screws up your vision.

 

[tbone1004]

@Addison Snyder I regularly recommend that people go through cavern or even cavern/intro training with just the good quality backup lights with a proper goodman sock. They have similar output to a 10w HID that were our primary lights in cave diving for many years and I still regularly do smaller cave dives with them instead of my big can lights.

@kelemvor those batteries would run that light for what 15 mins? 9s pack, 3.5ah/cell, 80% usable=25wh in that battery pack, 100w consumption =1/4 hour. I don't disagree with you though, we can make lights MUCH brighter, but unless there is some massive change in efficiency in terms of lumen/watt that shows up, they get impractical due to the size and expense of the battery packs needed to drive them.

 

[broncobowsher]

Power is useless without control. Easy enough to make a light that blasts all over the place. Probably best for video.
Now try and get some proper optics and make a good beam out of that light, that is where the magic is at.

 

[kelemvor]

Power is useless without control. Easy enough to make a light that blasts all over the place. Probably best for video.
Now try and get some proper optics and make a good beam out of that light, that is where the magic is at.

Yep. It's an area that most LED light manufacturers completely ignore. There's loads of room for improvement in the optics. If I recall, UWLD has done some work here, but their work is far from the end of the line in optics.

 

[tbone1004]

@Bobby has custom designed optics for the UWLD head design and has been optimized for underwater use. I am not aware of any other canister light that has done this which is the reason the head can have multiple emitters for efficiency, but remain small with a tight beam pattern. Most other manufacturers have to use a deeply recessed single emitter to have a tight beam pattern. Of note, the beam pattern of G1-G5 is often criticized, but it is exactly what was designed. G6 has been tightened up but still retains a useful beam spread to light up a room.

 

[CuriousRambler]

Maybe something better does comes out, but if you like what you have, you don't need to upgrade.

But without the iPhone XXVII, how will all my friends know I'm a productive member of today's society?!

I pretty much agree with everyone here. Technology will advance. But not likely in any way that's game changing to dive lights in a matter of weeks/months. Also, if current technology is working so well for so many, and you don't have any "if this light could only _______" type complaints, then do you really need any new features that pop up anyway?

There's more research than you can shake a stick at taking place globally with regards to battery technologies to replace lithium. I definitely don't stay up to date on pretty much any of them, but for sake of argument, let's assume one (or more) of them are currently very near or at the functional prototype stage. Assuming they have adequate funding/investors, it's still going to take many months - at best - to build a manufacturing base large enough to supply any demand at all. Either build new, or retrofit existing factories to manufacture brand new technology. That could easily mean new machines, possibly even machines that need to be designed and manufactured themselves, new training for employees, etc. Delays will inevitably exist for regulatory stuff like safety testing before they'll be allowed to ship large scale, fly with them, etc.

Then start thinking about what revolutionary battery technology means in terms of demand. Say you "only" increase the power density of lithium by 50%, weigh less, and are considerably safer. After all of the previously mentioned hurdles are cleared, dive lights are probably near the last products out there that will integrate the new technology, if only from a cost perspective. 50% increase in power density would be definitively revolutionary, so you'll see overwhelming demand come out of the medical industry, aerospace, tons of industrial applications. Elon Musk will need to build a whole new Gigafactory (Terafactory? Would the Earthy undertones undercut his Mars push too much?) to start churning them out for the auto industry. Just like lithium, it'll be years before supply catches up to demand enough to bring costs down to normal consumer levels and you splash with your first graphene battery powered can light - and all that for a canister that's a bit smaller. Don't forget this timeline assumes there's already functional technology on the table somewhere and the only delays are those involved in production and distribution.

Do you need a brighter light? Longer burn time? Smaller canister? If any of these are a strong "yes," then you may want to wait. I figure there are folks doing far more extreme dives than I'll ever do in my life, and they're successfully using existing technology. Not saying there's no room to improve, but good enough is good enough in some cases.

 

[Addison Snyder]

Let's just hope that if better battery tech comes out, it can conform to 18650s, etc. Then we don't need to upgrade 99% of our stuff.

 

[kelemvor]

Let's just hope that if better battery tech comes out, it can conform to 18650s, etc. Then we don't need to upgrade 99% of our stuff.

No manufacturers will have THAT nonsense. You can bet that the new battery tech will mandate that you buy new gear which uses it.

 

[tbone1004]

Since I am most familiar with UWLD and what @Bobby has done and I know he's on the leading edge of technology *regularly reads all of the white papers on what's coming, actively involved in development of emitters etc*, here's a rough rundown. I'm sure the timeline is not completely accurate, but it's close enough to show the overall message and I'm sure he will correct me.

Gen 4 was released ~6 years ago and was the lumen increase from 2600 to 3500.
Gen5 was released ~5 years ago and was the new battery canister to comply with new regulations but no changes to the primary light head.
Gen6 was newest release a few months ago and the battery didn't change, but the head did.

So it took 6 years for the emitters to make enough of an improvement to warrant the development cost of a new head design. The battery canister was a necessary evil to let them fly which is also why they are capped at 160wh. The timeline of the improvement of emitters is slow enough and this market is small enough that you have to have a big enough leap to warrant the investment cost. For the canisters that require a proper battery pack, the UN certification is IIRC ~$6k to have them tested and that is not including development of the BMS boards if they are not stock items, or the canister itself if the engineering has to change. The technology has to make a massive leap in order to justify that kind of investment and that's why you don't really see the can light companies releasing new lights every other year.
All that to say that the Gen4 lights from ~2014 are not obsolete yet, and while they have been surpassed by Gen6 in 2020, it is only a step change. It is not like going from Halogen to HID, or NiMH to LiPo.

 

[tbone1004]

Let's just hope that if better battery tech comes out, it can conform to 18650s, etc. Then we don't need to upgrade 99% of our stuff.

No manufacturers will have THAT nonsense. You can bet that the new battery tech will mandate that you buy new gear which uses it.

Some of the light heads out there have the proper boards in place that they can deal with a change in pack voltage with little other than a firmware update. The can itself would have to change if it's a different form factor, but that's the easy part. Other lights that take direct pack voltage in would struggle if it gets outside of the emitters voltage range.