A keychain-sized flashlight that uses a hi-intensity LED instead of a bulb. It comes in many classic LED colours, as well as a very cool bluish-white colour, very similar to HID headlights seen on expensive cars.
The design is very simple: Two coin-sized lithium batteries stacked between the leads of an LED housed in a plastic case with a little switch that breaks the contact between batteries and LED (why didn't I think of that).
Because LEDs are very efficient at converting electricity to light, they are said to be able to light continually for about a week.
The actual continuous activity time for photon lights is about 20 hours (for most colors, a couple last as long as 120 hours). Of course, this translates in to much longer useful activation in non-continuous terms. Compared to the 4 to 6 hours of continuous activity that a traditional D-Cell flashlight offers, this is quite an advancement indeed.

Besides being extremely useful tools (I have personally used them to find my way to my car in a dark lot, read a map from concealment, night-light my room during a blackout, and making drunk girls collapse at parties), photon lights are extremely good "rave toys", since they are light and can be moved rapidly by the hands, causing vision trails among people in darkened rooms. They can also be connected with a string and spun a la glowsticks. When manipulated by a person of sufficient skill, these lights actually appear to be bending curves and geometric figures of pure light.

A short description of the different photon light technology revisions:

The original Photon Microlight is waterproof, and is activated by pinching the unit. This is the only waterproof unit in the "official" photon light canon.

The Photon II Microlight is operated in the same way, except it features a locking on/off switch.

The Rave'n Party light comes in two varieties: "Strobe" and "Smooth". Both flavors cycle through all of the colors rapidly, either smoothly transitioning or strobing between colors, causing the vision trails left by them to have different characters. They come with different "extrusions" (transparent attachments to the LED) to further shape the character of the vision trail.

The Photon III Microlight functions similarly to the first and second of the series, but features three separate brightness settings and strobe frequencies.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.