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Being able to clearly see potential obstacles and find your buoys and reflective tape with your own two eyes while piloting your vessel at night is essential: you just can't rely on radar alerts or a night vision screen. Your sense of sight provides instant feedback, ensuring you can respond swiftly and smartly to a potentially dangerous situation and grab your cages with rhythm at a moment's notice. Electronic or digital signals, while helpful, will never instill the same level of confidence as clear eyesight. When you need to double-check and on-screen alerts, that delays your response time, and you may not be able to afford that. That's why your forward-facing lights need to be bright, capable of projecting light at a significant distance, and able to deliver instant on/off luminosity to also comply with USCG regulations.
Delivering a bright, far-reaching luminaire is no small feat and it requires far more than stuffing LEDs into a panel. You might see luminaires advertising literally hundreds of LEDs and wonder how DuraBrite’s mere 21 LEDs per panel can compete, given the Mini consists of 1 panel, and the Pro consists of 3 panels. But don't be fooled: not all lumens are created equal.
To ensure 21 LEDs achieve the same total lumens as 200, DuraBrite uses premium high power chips that massively outperform the competition. That means that even though the total lumens output may appear the same, DuraBrite's "punch" is far stronger, and our light beam travels much further. Both lights may appear bright when you look at them, but when you're on choppy seas in pitch black darkness, you will want that set of DuraBrite lights that shine brighter and further.
Our optic’s design also greatly impacts DuraBrite lighting's intensity. Many lights use optical reflectors (aka cups) with the LED chip in sight - a cheap and easy way to build lights. Additionally, these LED chips feature a 120-degree beam, which inherently produces scattered lights. These reflector designs depend on reflection to project light forward. Finally, the spatial arrangement of an LED array is key to effective real world optical power. You may see designs where high-power LEDs are used, but with chips spaced so far apart that the "compounding" effect is completely lost. The DuraBrite lens, however, takes in all light as soon as it's emitted from our high powered chips, internally redirecting and shaping light to the desired angle when exiting the lens. This minimizes scattering, as all optical energy is transmitted forward.
All these design considerations are critical when designing a truly powerful and effective forward-facing spotlight. It doesn’t matter what the lab says: there's more to luminaires than LED counts. DuraBrite has developed the winning formula through numerous field tests in real-world environments, delivering optimal performance on the ground, not just in a lab.
Purchase a set of DuraBrites and see the difference for yourself.
