Choosing the Best CREE LED Torches: My Guide

Brightness or distance? Narrow beam or wide dispersion? An hour of intense power or many nights of flooding light? You see so many advertisements. They come with all sorts of promises. Do they live up to the hype?

My country calls them torches. My partner calls them annoying, as I own too many to count. According to her, I have a strange fetish with torches. No matter their name, they provide convenient, portable light when darkness falls, and the mains electricity drops out. They are a necessity for camping, night fishing, and boating. They come in various shapes and sizes. Some have tapered bodies, while others are straight. Some are thick, while others are pencil-thin. Some use many batteries. Others require just one. Which one is the best?

Most agree that the ones with LEDs in them are a good start.

In recent times, there’s little choice but to use LEDs, as they have replaced most tungsten and halogen lamps. The LED system is a more efficient technology because it produces a far brighter light and uses less power to do it. The inclusion of CREE technology changes the LED game tenfold. If you add CREE into the LED equation, you’ve got a magical boost to LED brightness like no other.

CREE is a small computer chip that lives inside the CREE light. It controls the energy that’s being delivered to the diode’s emitter. You see, LEDs can produce intense light, but they are close to self-sacrificing when they do. They can’t receive high power for too long. Scientists have figured out how to work around the LED’s threshold by building a CREE circuit to switch off the light before it’s destroyed, turning it back on as soon as the excess energy has cleared the circuit. The fantastic thing is that CREE does this several thousand times a second without the operator knowing.

CREE is clever at knowing just how many electrons are required to do the job, especially when the battery’s voltage begins to drop, changing the circuit’s dynamics. CREE handles these changes and adapts accordingly. This is why it’s essential to buy quality when investing in any CREE LED torch or flashlight. Many cheap CREE variants out there look the part but break down prematurely. Just because it says it’s CREE doesn’t mean it’s quality CREE.

My first CREE LED torch came from the German-made Ledlenser P7 (above). I paid over two hundred Australian dollars for this one around ten years ago and still have it today. Powered by four alkaline AAA batteries, it’s waterproof and has a variable beam through a sliding focus (wide flood to narrow spot). The highly durable tail switch has two power settings (plus one extra on the momentary switch). Ledlenser not only looked at incorporating a high-quality CREE chip into their torch but also redesigned a lens to suit it, maximising every part of the beam, no matter what setting the slide focus is set to. Incredibly, there are few hot or cold spots to be found anywhere in its spotlight. In every way, it’s a little piece of genius engineering and worth the money you pay for it.

I keep a couple of pencil-type CREE LED torches (Wuben E-19) around the house, one in my car and another one in my work shirt pocket. They also use AAAs, and these come with four power modes. Low power is perfect for inspecting my beehive at night, and the high setting is fantastic for peering into walls and ceilings during the day. (I’m a maintenance guy.)

And then there are my tiny Olight I1R 2 EOS keyring torches. These are rechargeable via a USB port on the barrel and they come with two power settings. Margo absolutely loves hers and uses it all the time! We’ve even relied on them during camping trips and stayovers!

But my new favourite torch is a Wuben C3. She’s smaller than my Ledlenser P7, but not by much. It’s probably because its designers incorporated an in-built rechargeable battery instead of the AAA configuration. Four power modes give me true flexibility, with the brightest setting completely blowing my Ledlenser off the page! It’s totally amazing how much light this modern CREE torch produces. What would be more amazing is if the C3 incorporated a variable focus like the one in the Ledlenser. It’s a fixed width with a general spread of light (neither spot nor flood), but given its brightness, it hardly matters (the light isn’t as evenly distributed as the Ledlenser). When it’s on power setting four, the darkness burns away!

There is one important reason why all these torches have variable settings. High power greatly reduces battery life. By halving a torch’s brightness, its battery time quadruples (or thereabouts). The Wuben power range starts from low power first, and then you dial up the higher settings. The Ledlenser works the opposite way. It assumes you’ll want high-power first and then move to select low-power as an alternative. Furthermore, the Ledlenser has a half-press, momentary, extra-brightness pulse built into the main switch. That’s a great help when it comes to spotting things in a forest and looking for whatever ‘made that noise’. You’re not fumbling around with its settings, trying to dial up that extra power while ‘the thing’ gets away into the darkness!

As you can see, I use smaller lights that are more likely to fit inside a pocket, on a belt or in the palm of my hand. That’s because this size matches my purpose. I cannot advise on large baton torches, lanterns, or portable floods. In each of those categories, I’m sure there’s someone out there who knows that market well. (I’ve recently noticed CREE has infiltrated lanterns!)

Hey! Here’s one last pic of an older torch I keep in my car’s glovebox. It’s self-powered, not CREE; I can turn its crank and get some light fast. It’s not pretty, exceptionally bright or long-lasting between charges, but it’s good enough when there’s nothing left to use. I call it my torch of last resort!

-Michael