When buying a flashlight, there are many things that you need to take into account before you make your final decision and purchase. What size or shape you need, what kind of batteries suit you best, what kind of bulb would be best for your specific use, but most importantly how much light power do you need your flashlight to have – or how strong a light beam do you require.

When you’re in the market to buy a flashlight and you come upon the specifications, you might see a few confusing terms which you might not fully understand. Two of these terms would be lumens and candlepower. Although they might sound like the same thing but they are both used to measure two different features of the flashlight.

Candlepower is the measurement of the brightest point in a flashlight’s beam with focus of the beam not taken into consideration. A lumen, on the other hand, is the measurement of all visible light emanating from the flashlight.

You might not know exactly how many lumen or how much candlepower you would need your flashlight to have to fulfill your specific purpose – be it camping, hunting, tactical operations or everyday use, but you can easily figure it out. One of the easiest ways is to manually check the flashlight and decide is the light you see is ok for you or not. You can note the lumens and candlepower mentioned for the flashlight and determine by turning on the beam if it will suffice or not. If not, you have a basic idea of what the numbers are for and you can use that knowledge to figure out the right measurements for you.

Another way to figure out the correct lumens and candlepower that you would need is reading up online to see what experts suggest for particular applications. To start, you can take into account that a keychain light would be around 1 lumen and a 2AA penlight with a 1-watt LED lamp would offer almost 45 lumens. LED lamps are good because they don’t drain the battery very fast – but they don’t have a lot of reach. Incandescent bulbs can allow much brighter, meaning higher lumen measurement, viewing up to 20 yards away but will drain the battery quickly. In tactical operations, if you wish to temporarily blind an adversary, 80 lumens does the trick. But these days a more popular variant is a strobe which can cause disorientation and even loss of balance.

Since lumens and candlepower measure different things, higher measurements in either mean different kinds of results for different applications. If you are looking for an energy-efficient flashlight to illuminate a large area, opt for a flashlight with a higher lumen. If you want a flashlight that gives an intense beam, go for higher candlepower.