Stanley is making waves with its HID Flashlight

You have seen HID lights, the bright-bluish white car headlamps that were once only found on high end sports models but are more prevalent now.  What if you could take that same intensity and put it into a package that could be placed in a flashlight body. Well Stanley did just that. With 4200 Lumens, the Stanley Spotlight is being referred to as a giant killer by many spotlight aficionados. In order to get this kind of output, consumers either had to cough up major dollars or purchase one of the lights offered by the discount warehouses, which while very powerful, were also very large and cumbersome for handheld use.

You might ask yourself, why would you need a light this powerful.  There are many reasons to have one of these.  Most of the emergency lights I have seen are very weak in light output. The power goes out and you are left with a flaccid yellow beam that you can observe getting dimmer and dimmer with each passing minute. The Stanley on the other hand, throws out enough light, that not only can you see an entire area, the reflected light is strong enough to light up the peripheral areas.  And the light is white, well a blue-white and very intense.  One observer called it a portable sun.  In an emergency this is the light I would want with me.  Not to be forgotten is the three LED walking light on top of the unit. The light placement confused me at first, but when I took the light out for an evening walk, I realized why the lower output LED lights were placed on top of the unit. When walking the LED lights point forward when the spotlight is carried in the down position, very clever.

Due to the high out put of the light, I took it to a nearby clear cut to see how far the light could illuminate distant objects.  The Stanley lit a tree line that was just shy of a mile away. beyond that I could not see. At a distance of over a 1/2 mile, the green eyes of a grazing herd of deer were easily seen.  Shining across open water, tree lines were lit from over a 1/2 mile. There was some fog the night I tested the unit, so that performance may be understated. Safe to say, you will be seeing boaters snap these up. One of the largest frustrations when anchoring a large boat is the 12V cord is always to short to run up to the bow and check your anchor set. The cordless nature of this light overcomes that shortcoming.  Besides, when you pull the trigger on this light, everyone in the anchorage will know you have arrived.

Other observations I have made, when shining this light on the neighbor’s deer herd he feeds, try and not hit his bedroom window with the beam as he might think an errant sports car is about to visit him up close and personal.  Use good judgment when using the Stanley HID during hunting season at night in areas where there might be a poaching problem.  Do not shine this light at the car in the incoming lane when he fails to dim his brights.  Strapping two of these to your bumper and directly wiring them to power may endear you to your buddies at the hunting club, however the local law enforcement will not be so amused.

The 45 minutes of battery runtime is a good thing.  The battery strength indicator came on long before my unit had discharged.  The startup time was very reasonable, a few seconds to full strength.  The 12V power cord has a cigarette lighter attachment that allows the light to be powered off of the car power. You may need to run your engine to keep the voltage up so that the power comes from the car and not the battery. I wish the charge indicator light would function when running on 12 volts.

I think the Stanley HID SPotlight is best summed up by the question posed, “Why does it take a non lighting manufacturer to come out with a light like this?.”  A light that is affordable, costing a third of what many lights of the same output cost from companies that are exclusively light manufacturers and Stanley, a company known for its tools, instead bring this answer to the market.  All I can say, is thanks Stanley for giving consumers what they wanted. I  now understand why stores had a hard time keeping these on the shelves.

My question to Stanley is, how do you top this?  Spotlight enthusiasts are expecting great things from you now. As for me, I can’t wait to see the new model.

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