The Ledger

What this table is

30 lights, 19 of which take a battery you can replace and 11 of which do not. The lumens column is the manufacturer's published maximum output, cited on the page where each light is reviewed. The price column is pulled live from the retailer. The lumens-per-dollar column is the first divided by the second, and it recomputes every time a price moves — a value ranking that does not recompute is a value ranking that stopped being true.

Where we have not pulled a live price for a light, its row says so and its buy button reads Check price. We do not fill that gap with a remembered number, an MSRP or a typical street price, because a value verdict computed from an invented price would look exactly like a real one.

Why the battery column is not a footnote

Two lights can produce identical lumens per dollar on the day you buy them and cost wildly different amounts to own. A light built around a standard 18650 or 21700 can be re-celled for a few dollars whenever the battery tires, so its life is limited by its body and your interest in it. A light with a sealed cell cannot be re-celled by an ordinary owner: when the battery reaches the end of its cycle life, the aluminum, the optics and the switch go in the bin with it.

Almost nobody publishes how many cycles that is. Across every specification cited on this site we found two figures: Petzl rates its CORE pack at 2 years or 300 charging cycles, and Maglite quotes up to 2,000 charge and discharge cycles for the LiFePO4 pack in the ML150LRS. Everyone else is silent, which is exactly why a replaceable cell is worth more than any published cycle rating.

What the ranking cannot see

Three things, and they matter. It cannot see beam shape: COAST publishes 352 meters of reach from 300 lumens while Streamlight publishes 165 meters from 500, and the ratio treats those as a straightforward win for the second. It cannot see color rendering, so a 90-CRI light that shows you what color a wire is scores below a cheaper one that does not. And it cannot see whether the headline output has a published duration beside it, which is why we adjust for that by hand and say so on every page.

Use the table as a first filter and the individual pages for the decision. That is what it is for.